English Please!

24 July 2010 - It may sound a bit odd, but one of the things that makes traveling in Japan so thrilling is that not many people speak English. As a solo traveler you are out there on your own, but you have all those friendly, helpful and incredibly polite Japanese people willing to help a hand. They even walk with you all the way to show you when you lost. English is picking up though - in Tokyo and Kyoto I met quite some people with some limited English. So how about this from China? A new five-year plan (what is it with these five-year plans?) will require Beijing civil servants aged under 40 who hold university degrees to learn at 1,000 English sentences. The Beijing News reports that the move is designed to help the capital become a world-class city. Now it would be helpful if people actually understood what those sentences mean?

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