Golf club staff takes lessons in Mandarin to woo Chinese golfers скачать в хорошем качестве

Golf club staff takes lessons in Mandarin to woo Chinese golfers

‘The Chinese are coming’ is a phrase so often heard, when discussing the global economy, yet one company is preparing to give its golfing resorts an edge when it comes to attracting tourists from this emerging superpower. Key customer-facing Staff at The Oxfordshire, one of the UK’s leading Golf Resort and Hotels are learning Mandarin – in an attempt to woo the emerging Chinese golf market. Like many sectors of the Chinese economy, golf is growing exponentially. In the late 1990s there were approximately 20 golf courses in the whole of China, now there are hundreds with more at the planning stage. It is anticipated that with the inclusion of Golf at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, that Golf will become even more popular in China with estimates that there could be 20 million golfers in the country by 2020. With Britain established as a popular tourist destination for the Chinese, the Oxfordshire aim to attract Chinese tourists and business people who are looking to combine their visit with their love of golf. By teaching their key staff some conversational Mandarin they hope this will give the resort a real business advantage by making their Chinese guests feel at home and receive the same level of customer service as their English-speaking guests. The Oxfordshire golf club is located just outside the historical university town of Oxford and is nestled in the rolling hills of the Chilterns. The course boasts not one, but two holes that feature in the renowned list of the “500 World’s Greatest golf holes”. Receptionists, duty managers and the golf pros are in the process of being given a grounding in conversational structures and greetings, as well as phrases more specific to the game of golf. Linguistics guru Paul Noble has designed the tailor-made course using a unique conversation-based, paper-free language learning method. Although some staff, like Harry the assistant Golf pro, was initially shocked by this unusual initiative, they are embracing the project and can understand the business rationale. Having started the course their perception of the difficulty of learning Mandarin has also been changed with this conversational method. Amongst membership at The Oxfordshire, there are also significant numbers of businessmen and women who may also see an advantage of inviting their Chinese guests and business partners to the resort with that extra welcome. Since Golf has grown so quickly in China, many of its participants are not aware of the ‘golfing terminology’ so often used by players around the world, but Paul Noble has consulted leading Chinese golfers to attain an accurate translation of some of the most popular golfing phrases. Paul Noble is the founder of the ‘Paul Noble Institute’. He has an IQ of 174 and has developed his own technique for teaching foreign languages, based on a lexical approach. This means there are no books and no memorisation and the conversation-based method makes learning fun and easy, an ideal choice for the staff at the Oxfordshire.