percysmith

I have no idea why HX is selling its FAs do Wing Chun. Do they think more pax will switch if they think they're going to be beaten up?

percysmith

I was corrected by the local cabbies during my last visit to TPE that what they usually speak is Taiwanese which is not Minnanhua. The closest thing to Taiwanese is Minnanhua but there're substantial differences.

percysmith

You don't need to have anything to do with Wing Chun to know. HX sells a lot of the Wing Chun hosties ads on NowTV.

TheGreatestX

CX is now recruiting flight attendants from Taiwan.

https://www.cathaypacific.com/cpa/en...0007d21c39____

fratboy

That's been happening since Dec 2008. I provided language training for the first 8 groups, roughly 200 of them.

Cathay Boy

Well, you don't, I do, not everyone in the world watches NowTV (still not sure what the heck that is.)

Cathay Boy

Trying to catch the recent flurry of Ip Man movies I guess. Ever since those movies I see there are tons of signs in Hong Kong selling Wing Chun martial arts.

angrybaker

i find the english level of the FA's far better than the english level of anyone under the age of 20 here in the USA.

ChrisLi

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

(super OT) NowTV is HK paid TV station from PCCW as an extended service of broadband business

beep88

I know someone from Taiwan who (and a few of his fellow recruits, all working for a competitor at that time) was hired ~2002 for their mandarin skills and education/cultural background - as opposed to hiring from PRC.

QRC3288

Yea, I think this is completely true on CX, as I'm not sure they hire direct from the mainland! CX's Taiwan contingent, of which I believe almost all are recruited in Taiwan but then who move to HK and are based here, are relied upon to be the Mandarin-speaking crews on Mandarin-required flights (in addition to some of the Malaysians who speak good Mandarin, and some of the local HK staff who can as well). The only exception is mainland China (PVG and PEK, CX metal's only destinations there) where I don't believe the Taiwanese cabin crew are allowed to fly. However, you will always have at least one or more of them on flights to/from TPE, as well as the Japan and Korea flights that fly via Taipei (and usually then have a routing direct back to HKG). Like all the other staff, they can fly anywhere else on the network. I'm not sure if CX has other routes (say JFK) with a lot of mainlanders (Mandarin-speaking), where they have programmed their rostering system to automatically assign a native Mandarin speaker to the flight. Maybe...but not sure.

fratboy had a pretty comprehensive (and to my knowledge correct) explanation of some of the hiring idiosyncrasies at CX.

Taipei

Well I think depends on age. Many older Taiwanese do not speak Manadrin well or very limited Manadarin so they only use Taiwanese (or in some cases Japanese). Also the some older Taiwanese speak only Manadarin and not Taiwanese. All younger/middle age Taiwanese speak Manadarin, but many do not speak Taiwanese. What is interesting, there is kind a middle age gap in some areas of Taiwan, with less Taiwanese speakers than younger Taiwanese mainly because of the educational/national language policy at the time a person went to school.

CX HK

Language in Taiwan has always been interesting; if you speak to some of the older generations of Taiwanese, those who are currently grandparents, they will probably know some Japanese - or actually be quite fluent in it! - due to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan some 60 years ago. Japanese culture is still quite prevalent in Taiwan, but less so now.

Mandarin is often referred to as 北京話, or Beijing Hua, rather than Mandarin, from my interactions with Taiwanese people (I speak no Taiwanese and poor Mandarin... typical Hongkonger )

traveler18

I flew 6 CX segments last week including 2 long haul in J & F. All attendants spoke and understood English well.

Orion

Many years ago I heard these words spoken by cabin crew on the Pan Am shuttle: "Please no to smoke".