Mother tongue tied

WHEN MERCHANT BANKER Ahmad Ayaz came to Hong Kong with his Chinese wife, he found it tremendously difficult to learn Cantonese.

It is an experience shared by many expatriates as they struggle with a script and language structure radically different to those they are used to.

Despite considerable effort, 45-year-old Mr Ayaz, in common with the majority of expat learners of Cantonese, achieved only modest results. But few are so deeply affected by the challenge as the Singaporean banker was. For him it triggered a new interest so compelling that he was persuaded to change careers.

'I was intrigued by the question of why, when we never fail to learn our first language, I could not succeed in learning this language to an adequately competent level,' said Mr Ayaz.

'There is no psychologically and neurologically normal Hong Kong child who does not know Cantonese, so I asked myself, why am I worse than a four-year-old? I thought the only way to learn is the way children learn, because they never fail.'

The experience inspired Mr Ayaz, a former vice-president of JPMorgan Securities in Asia Pacific, to start studying - as an autodidact. The answers he found spurred him on to devise his own language teaching method called ReLiving Language Childhood (RLC).

And so confident is he of its potential to unlock rapid initial acquisition of spoken language that he has set up his own language school based on the technique - the Dr English Centre at the City Garden Shopping Arcade in North Point.