What does it take for FA to be Language Qualified?
 

When we fly foreign carriers, we sometimes question the English ability of their flight attendants. I sometimes wonder about the foreign language ability of UA flight attendants.

A few months ago, I was in an NRT-TPE flight. While there were tons of Taiwanese flight attendants onboard, the person making the announcement spoke terrible mandarin - the person's native language was probably a different dialect. If I did not hear the English version first, I would not understand what the Chinese announcement was. This was an intra-Asia crew based in NRT.

Yesterday, I was on PVG-LAX, SFO based crew. The main FA making the Chinese announcements spoke fluent Mandarin (with Singapore accent). However, two things annoyed me big time. He would always blow into the mic before he started talking and he always used the word Ni-Men (you people) when addressing the passengers on the PA.

Like in some other languages, there are 2 words in Chinese for YOU - NI for the casual form (like the tu in French) or NIN for the respectful form (like the vous in French). It is extremely impolite in a service environment, and on the PA, to use the casual form. To make it worse, he used the plural form - "you people".

Yes, the flight was full of kids going to summer camp, it sounded like he was talking to them :mad:

So, I wonder:

1 - what does it take for a US-based UA FA to qualify for a foreign language?
2 - how do they decide who makes the announcement onboard? (You would think the one who speaks the most fluently does but I am sure that is not the way.)
3 - do they make any consideration for dialects/accents of the various languages?
4 - do the have scripts for the standard announcements in the applicable foreign languages/dialects?

Thanks.

interesting question - giving it a bump

Are you an American that able to speak Mandarin ? Or are you an Native mandarin speaker that born and raised in Taiwan or mainland China ?

To me, as an Hong Kong borned and raised chinese, the most troublesome is the menus, not the announcement. I have found all menus from all airlines except CX has the correct translation to chinese traditional for flights going into HKG. The translation looks as if it is chinese traditional as in writing, but it is actually chinese simplified, just like icecream should be 雪糕 instead of 冰淇淋, and salad should be 沙律 instead of 沙拉. There are many more examples with the menus.

Since there are confusion with the menus, I would expect there are many of these translation hickups on the script that the language FA read on the announcement. Some FA will just read whatever on the script without using their own common sense.

I don't know the rule of FA language qualifier, but I do agree, in general the UA FAs doing a less than competent job on safety/general announcement (especially in Mandarin/Cantonese). The issue I found is it seems they don't have a standard script to follow when doing safety/boarding announcement, it feels like they make it up as it goes. Every flights I was on (mainly 895/896), the safety announcement was a bit different.

Native Mandarin speaker here.

It is funny that I was looking at the C menu on PVG->LAX and thought some HK person must have done it :D

I find the TPE-NRT Chinese menu pretty decently done though.

Are you saying for HKG flights, CX got it wrong and everyone else got it right? (I might be too jetlagged to read your sentence correctly.) Whose Chinese Traditional writing would CX/KA/BR/CI/GE use for flights between HKG/MFM and TPE/KHH :D

I doubt the UA script says YOU PEOPLE, unless Ross Perot wrote it :D

Actually UA is better if it is compare with CO, as CO doesn't even have a base in Asia, they just rely on the single language FA on each flight that base in EWR/IAH to do their job.

I did EWR-HKG-EWR, so the laguage FA is a mandarin speaker, she speaks so fast I have no idea to catch on what she is speaking at all. I felt bad for those cantonese speaking people that speak very little english, they just not able to understand any announcement at all. UA however there are always more than 1 language FA on board, as they always use mix bases FA on each flight, like HKG base will fly all those routes out of HKG and beyond, they always change the ratio like HKG will do HKG-ORD for a month, then vice versa. But even without the HKG base, SFO base will have more FA that is able to speak cantonese or mandarin.

I discussed these issues with language certified FA on UA flight SFO-NRT-TPE 3 years ago. She happened to serve in C class the whole trip where I sat, and she was making the announcements in Chinese and Japanese, so we struck up conversation.
1. She mentioned must be "native qualified" -- take test to validate. She is from Taiwan but has many years of Japanese language, so was able to qualify to serve on the whole route in 2 languages.
2. Seniority determines who speak, if more than one language qualified FA
3. Generally mandarin for TPE and China flights, but for HKG they try to get Cantonese speaker.
4. Yes, they read from script.

I too have been really surprised by the poor Mandarin from the UA flight attendants in general. My experience is mostly on UA835/836. Sometimes the announcements are almost impossible to understand, like someone just used RosettaStone for a couple months, with heavy accent and improper tones.

It is strange, because sometimes they have FA's on board who are clearly native-level speakers, but the one making the announcement is terrible.

Another issue is that they often don't have the mandarin-speaking FA available to serve Chinese passengers. More than once during meal service, I have had to translate for Chinese passengers sitting next to me when the FA comes down the aisle and barks "chicken or beef" to a Chinese person who can't speak any English and doesn't know how to reply.

As for the simplified/traditional characters, I have to disagree and say that using 冰淇淋 and 沙拉 is just fine. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that any person born in Taiwan/HK/Mainland will understand that it means ice cream and salad, and UA has chosen to go with simplified characters to cater to the huge and growing Mainland market.

Same here. I hardly ever understand the German or French version when hovering into Europe and am glad that they eventually will provide an English or Englishesque translation.

I wished that they just dropped the non-English stuff and cut the crap short anyway.
Listen to Singaporeans when they speak 'English' and you stop wondering about the pain they inflict to other languages.


So my best guess regarding the original question: not much.

I know some Singaporeans with BBC grade RP accents. They just switch back to the more incomprehensible version when they are on the phone or when drunk.

It's the same phenomenon as the "6 pint Welshman" you meet living in London - every pint puts their accent 25 miles closer to home :D

CO has 3 speakers onboard the HKG flights.

Doesn't ethnic traffic mostly fly on their own country's carriers? I've always thought that someone who doesn't comprehend English well from China would stick with Chinese carriers overseas whereas Americans (including Chinese-Americans) would tend to choose the US carriers?

Many Chinese-Americans don't have that great of a grasp of Chinese anyways and wouldn't know the difference between "ni men" and "nin men" or wouldn't care that much, I know I don't care too much.

I've flown Air China before, their English is quite bad. Though it is kinda neat that they speak English on their domestic flights as well.

At least in my own personal experience, my parents helped to buy plane tickets and stuff for my grandparents to come visit us. Since we usually took United over to Hong Kong, we ended up getting them United plane tickets. To help them transit when connecting (since they didn't speak English) my relatives would write out a set of flash cards with English and the corresponding Chinese phrase on them so they could at least show the card (and the English-speaker could pick the right card to respond or point or get a translator).

So probably they are on foreign airlines because their relatives in the US helped to get them those tickets. Could be also that they ended up to be cheaper for one reason or another.

Compared to a lot of airlines, UA FAs are pretty good in their foreign language skills (I am trilingual and have really noticed this) The best I have noticed have been on LH...especially senior intra-Europe FAs...I had one purser last month on a flight from FRA to MPX... native German, perfect English, perfect French and perfect Italian...and the other crew members were fluent as well! SK and KL FAs also do very well!

The worst language skills I have noticed have been on SQ and JL, especially out of Europe...Surprisingly, I have had a number of FAs with excellent language skills on SU as well as on LV...who would have "thunk"!

To be honest, I really don't care too much about the language skills of FAs...I am far more concerned about the skills of those in the "front office" talking to ATC and the tower...I have heard and witnessed many "near misses" and runway incursions over the years because of the lack of language skills!!

Although I don't have any experience with Mandarin, I do have some positive experiences with Korean speakers onboard.

When I recently flew NRT-ICN, the language skills of the FAs (at least for Korean) were excellent. In fact, the Korean announcement was much more succinct and informative, much more so than the English announcement.