Global Business: Brands that Love Language Learners

Welcome to The 5-Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources, and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

Hola. Welcome to The 5-Week Linguist Show. Today, I wanted to talk about global business and brands that love language learners. So I wanted to talk about five different brands today that didn’t set out to be incredibly valuable to language learners, but they have. And I want to share with you specifically, how to use and take advantage of what they offer language learners.

Global business and McDonald’s.

So, McDonald’s is a very controversial subject in many ways, for obvious reasons, fast food and health and Supersize Me. And I certainly don’t have any arguments really against anybody’s concerns about eating too much fast food. However, I have to admit that McDonald’s holds a very special place in my heart because it was my first job when I was in high school. And I had a really difficult childhood if I’m really honest, and I get into it in bits and pieces. And I’m from a very illustrious family quite frankly, people have done some really amazing things. But my parents’ marriage ended when I was young and my mom had one expectation of life and we ended up living in complete poverty after my parents got divorced.

And McDonald’s gave me the opportunity to actually buy my own school clothes and buy shampoo and things that were not coming easily to me before then. So I’m really grateful to this company for that. And when I think about the training program, I moved up to sort of shift manager so I was able to handle a lot of things. It really give me a lot of responsibility. And I saw all the opportunities that they gave to people without education and the training materials were excellent. And I do have to owe some of what they done or some of what I’ve learned as a teacher about making things easy and simple and repeating things don’t need to be hard oftentimes. Good training materials, good pictures and keeping messages simple can be really a good thing. And so I’m really partial to them. And I also had some interesting experiences.

I moved too quickly to the drive-thru and where you talk to people. This was before we had all the headphones and we had a speaker and I used to have to answer, “Welcome to McDonald’s drive-thru. Can I take your order?” And oftentimes people would entertain themselves and their friends by trying to order specific things like, “I want a hotdog,” “We haven’t invented the McQweenie,” I would say, or they wanted a Whopper or Pepsi. Of course, things that are at rival, Burger King.

And so over the years, fortunately, my life is really different than it was in those days. I am doing a lot better financially than I was as a teenager. I’m not living in total poverty. I have a master’s degree. I have a home. I live in Cambridge, England. I speak several languages. I feel really, really, really, really blessed, but I’m really grateful to them. They keep giving me the opportunity to see some immediate rewards for my work and my effort, and they’ve really served me in the long term. And as I’ve traveled throughout the world, I’ve noticed some interesting things when I go into McDonald’s. So I took notice really early on in traveling, how interesting some of the menu offerings were and some of the practices. And now looking back, of course, I see that this was this brand adapting to local cultures and languages.