When cram school isn’t enough, send your kids off to English village. That’s been the idea in South Korea for a few years now, where self-contained towns – complete with main streets, bakeries, pubs, theaters – are populated with native English speakers.
Just like the apple pie town you grew up in, except that not speaking English is strictly forbidden. It’s the law, or something like it.
The idea is to keep some of the voracious English learners (and their money) in their home country, while not sacrificing the experience of language immersion.
Leaders in Taiwan are following Korea’s lead; an English village is going up in Taoyuan County.
The Taipei Times feature notes that language immersion camps like the English village are increasingly popular around the world – in the U.S., it’s Chinese and Arabic. The global cross-pollination of faux language towns looks on the surface like something most urban areas already have in Chinatowns and the like: large clusters of native speakers of a single foreign language.
But this new breed of town is designed from the ground up to emulate places from other countries, and some of them might even function on some level like real municipalities. So if they all follow that one sacred decree – thou shalt not speak in other tongues – would we be facing a major urban innovation, a new kind of cultural sovereignty?
It’d be like stepping into Luxor in Las Vegas and having to reserve a room in ancient Egyptian. I like it.
I mean, I saw it coming. Maintaining a travel blog has its pitfalls, the biggest one being there’s not much to write about when you’re not going anywhere.
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