By DYMPHNA CALICA-LA PUTT

The preppy public relations and sales professional is enrolled in a class at Las Vegas Chinese School where she is learning the Mandarin language. Pinyin – or Chinese phonics used to transcribe Chinese character pronunciations – is one of the first lessons that Velez-Aber learned in the 12-week session..

On her ninth week, Velez-Abercan, among others, already recites the seven days of the week and counts one to 10 in Mandarin Chinese.

While she admits that she still needs to perfect the accent, she can already speak 100 common phrases in the Mandarin language.

Studying Mandarin Chinese was an easy choice for Velez-Aber, who is looking to make a mark in the already-saturated sales industry in Las Vegas.

“Las Vegas is a sales-generated state,” she said, noting that in her local experience in real estate and sales, some 80 percent of her clientele are Chinese.

Velez-Aber, an eight-year resident of Las Vegas, is an immigrant from the Philippines where the language of instruction in schools is English.

“In my country, I grew up thinking that when you learn English, you can go anywhere,” she said.

Armed with that thought, her knowledge and skills, and a fluent mastery of the English language, the veteran public relations professional ventured to the United States. She had hoped to use her experience in the Asia-Pacific market to establish a similar successful career in the U.S., where she envisioned an eventual shift to the high-end luxury retail sales industry.

“But when I got to Las Vegas, I found (the sales business) is so hard to penetrate because I had zero knowledge about Chinese,” Velez-Aber said.

“In this industry, you have to be competitive, you have to enhance your skills,” she said, concluding that choosing to learn Mandarin Chinese is the best career strategy she has done thus far.

Instrumental in Velez-Aber’s aim for her strategic career move is Las Vegas Chinese School.

“Learning conversational Chinese definitely adds advantage in the workplace and in finding jobs in Las Vegas,” school principal Hsiaochin Cathy Endy said.

“Knowing functional Chinese help with an employee’s work efficiency and a prospective employee’s opportunity to land a job,” she added.

The school’s goal of helping Las Vegas residents who are interested to learn Chinese goes back 16 years when it was established in 1996. The institution was founded by educator Mei Tang and was called the Las Vegas Chinese Academy.

Endy was hired as a teacher in 1998 and for 10 straight years displayed her passion and dedication in teaching the Chinese language. In 2008, when Tang retired, she passed on the management responsibilities to Endy and appointed her principal of the school.

Since that time, Endy and her husband, Eric, have been promoting the Chinese culture to American society via the school, which they renamed Las Vegas Chinese School. The couple own and manage the school.

Since its inception, Las Vegas Chinese School’s integrative approach to teaching the Chinese language makes it “the destination for those wishing to get a grasp of the growing Chinese culture for the new generation of Americans.”

The school’s 5,000-square-foot building is dedicated to student and teacher use. It is located near Chinatown on Spring Mountain Road, which is known as Las Vegas’ Asian corridor. Las Vegas Chinese School has more than a dozen classrooms, a computer laboratory and a state-of-the-art multipurpose room. Its preschool classrooms even are equipped with toddler restrooms.

While the former Las Vegas Chinese Academy only offered multilevel Mandarin classes every Saturday, the Las Vegas Chinese School under the Endys’ management had diversified and added the daily preschool classes and after-school homework help.

In addition, it started offering Chinese and Chinese proficiency classes. At the same time, it provides math and English enrichment classes for school-aged children. Over time, the school has gained a reputation in the city as a good institution that prepares children who will take the scholastic achievement tests or SATs. It is actually known as “an elite post-high school preparatory academy.”

Choir, dance and Chinese brush painting classes, meanwhile, are also offered and are examples of the school’s integrative approach to the Chinese culture. An English as Second Language course, popularly known as ESL, is also taught.

But school’s Chinese language classes remain one of the most popular, especially in this city where the unemployment rate has been soaring for the past several months, and where many job seekers are looking to have an edge over others.

Recently, LVCS saw a surge of adult class enrollees with students saying they need the Mandarin Chinese language skill for their present job positions or for a future career.

“We have had adult students coming to us stating that their employers paid for their tuition. They are being sent to China for work by their company and they need to learn Chinese language to do business in Asia,” Endy said.

Other students also told her they lost money-making opportunity because of being unable to communicate with their Chinese-speaking clients

“As such, being able to converse in Chinese is becoming increasingly important in the workplace,” Endy said of the trend.

As language student Velez-Aber had keenly discerned, “Chinese is really the second biggest language now.”

Chinese’s choice is Las Vegas

Velez-Aber’s observation on the importance of the Chinese language is confirmed by a Chinese native who is immersed in the business of facilitating business cooperation between China and Nevada.

Julia Zhang, of the Nevada Commission on Economic Development in Beijing, said, “It is unquestionably good to learn Mandarin Chinese language these days.”

The Nevada Commission on Economic Development is a state agency established in 1983 to promote and encourage vital economic interests of Nevada. It stimulates business expansion, attracts new businesses to promote a robust, diversified and prosperous economy.

Its Beijing office was established in July 2011 to bring more investors to Nevada. Las Vegas is the city that Chinese investors are eyeing “because of huge business opportunities here,” Zhang said.

In response to the anticipated arrival of more Chinese investors to Las Vegas, Zhang strongly recommends that prospective job seekers brush up on being bilingual in Mandarin Chinese.

“If the job applicants are interested in applying at Chinese-owned or managed businesses, it is important to be bilingual,” she said.

“You can also learn some Chinese culture during the process of learning Mandarin, which will definitely make job applicants better understand the Chinese company’s culture and thus adapt quickly to the new environment and new team,” she added.

Zhang noted the commission’s office has already initiated several visits from wealthy businessmen and corporations from China.

“Many are interested in hotels and real estate,” she said, adding, “The reason is that China’s real estate market is on the decline, and the market size of real estate is shrinking.

“So, many business persons in the real estate field (in China) are beginning to seek opportunities overseas,” she added.

Las Vegas offers good opportunities given the cheaper real estate prices which resulted from the recession, she said.

In the employment scene, a familiarity in Chinese culture and language will be useful in customer service, real estate, and sales. Since more investors are becoming interested in different industries, the language skill will be useful in more kinds of businesses as well, she said.

Zhang said the Nevada Commission on Economic Development will continue to work to attract wealthy Chinese individuals and corporations for more investments in Nevada, specifically in Las Vegas.

The intense interest of the state government to attract Chinese investors to Las Vegas resonates in the federal field where the Obama administration is doing similar “step up” efforts.

Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, who is now the country’s ambassador to China, was quoted in a recent interview saying “Chinese investments into the U.S. (are) vital to economic growth, job creation and productivity.”

In fact, the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service has recently been regularly organizing investment fairs and conferences targeted at attracting Chinese investment. The agency is the trade promotion arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Startalk stresses importance of foreign languages

Government’s efforts to attract Chinese investments are evident through other programs as well. One such endeavor is the federal program called Startalk, established in 2007.

Startalk is an initiative that aims to improve the teaching and learning of strategically important world languages.

True to form, Mandarin Chinese is one of the languages in the program. “This again tells you of how important the Chinese language is now,” Endy said.

The federal program’s mission is to increase the number of Americans learning, speaking, and teaching “critical need foreign languages.” This is “by offering students from kindergarten to high school with summer programs that exemplify best practices in language education.”

Another component of this program is training of educators who teach these critical languages that also include, among others, Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Portuguese and Russian.

Startalk aims to “form an extensive community of practice that seeks continuous improvement in such criteria as outcomes-driven program design, standards-based curriculum planning, learner-centered approaches, excellence in selection and development of materials, and meaningful assessment of outcomes.”

Endy herself is a product of the 72-hour federal program. This – aside from seminars sponsored by the Southern California Council of Chinese Schools – is what gave her a more in-depth appreciation of her advocacy as a Chinese Language teacher.

In March, the Las Vegas Chinese School was the site of choice for the daylong training of Chinese language teachers in Las Vegas under the Startalk program. It was the second year in a row that the school was chosen as the site for the annual training.

As the recent training offered by Startalk to local teachers emphasizes the growing importance of the language, so does the choice of venue recognize the reputation of Las Vegas Chinese School as one of the finest in the city.

Learning the language

At Las Vegas Chinese School, Endy and her team of language educators understand that learning a new language is difficult.

In each class, teachers use songs, easily recognizable flash cards, and textbooks in teaching Mandarin Chinese.

“We use the Five Cs in teaching the language,” the school’s adult conversational instructor Xiaowei Hunt said. Hunt is a licensed advanced placement Chinese teacher who also teaches at the Clark High School.

The Five Cs system was developed in 1993 by a coalition of four national language organizations that include the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the American Association of Teachers of French, the American Association of Teachers of German, and the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

The group, after receiving federal funding and a mandate to develop national standards for language instruction, identified five goal areas that encompass language learning: communication, cultures, connections, comparisons and communities.

n Communication stresses the use of language for communication in “real-life” situations. It emphasizes what students can do with language rather than what they know about language.

n Culture and the understanding of which is expected to develop a better understanding and appreciation of the relationship between languages and other cultures, as well as the student’s native culture.

n Connections are emphasized as teachers use content from other subject areas and integrate this with language lessons.

n Comparison is used when language students are encouraged to compare and contrast languages and cultures.

n Communities and the immersion of students in it are done through activities that include field trips, use of email and the Internet, and exchange programs.

Hunt noted the Five Cs is what guides her when teaching her adult conversational Chinese class at the Las Vegas Chinese School. It helps make teaching Chinese more effective.

The school’s adult language classes span 12 weeks, at the end of which each student “can identify and understand a native Chinese speaker speaking 70 most commonly used expressions in Mandarin Chinese,” Endy said.

An adult class session at Las Vegas Chinese School will enable a student to do an oral self-introduction with at least 10 complete sentences. The student can create 20 or more simple sentences and will be able to carry a conversation.

“The student can ask about last name and full name, nationality, health condition, thanks, apology, occupation, the current date including year, month and date in the month,” Endy said.

“A student can also ask if you are busy with your work, if you are tired or that you are happy to know each other and can say good-bye. He or she can also sing a song in Chinese,” she added.

In addition to engaging in simple conversation, those who finish a 12-week course can also read short paragraphs or conversations where words of high frequency are presented.

At the same time, the student can write his or her own name, phone number, occupation and a favorite phrase or sentence showing personality or belief.

The all important business promotion on a business card can also be written, Endy said. For example, a student whose business is in real estate can write “Your house, your asset” in Chinese characters, she said.

She also said that the knowledge a student gains at the end of each session “depends on how much time and effort each individual spends with the lessons.”

“Adult students usually find it challenging to get their tones correct when speaking Chinese and memorizing Chinese characters when reading and writing it,” Endy said.

“Our instructor uses gestures like hand or head movements to show different tones when helping students grasp the tones in this tonal language,” she said, adding, “She helps students associate Chinese characters with a picture since some Chinese characters are picturelike.”

Chinese language student Velez-Aber said that on her 10th week in class, she can already recognize some 20 basic characters. But it is the Mandarin words and phrases that she has found very valuable.

In Las Vegas, there are a lot of visitors who can be possible clients, she said. “We have very limited time to interact with them. When they come up to you, they have the intention of buying a product,” she said. “It is now up to (the sales professional) to make that intention a purchase,” she added.

Velez-Aber also said that each encounter with a prospective client is valuable. “We only have 20 seconds to make an impression,” she said. To her, Mandarin words and phrases aid in making that impression really well.