Prime Minister Rudd's personal interest in Asia and his two recent trips to the region have highlighted the importance to Australia of understanding why people think and act the way they do there. In Japan in mid-June, Mr. Rudd mentioned that he'd like to see Australia become, over time, the most Asia-literate country in the world.

That's an admirable aim, especially after the damaging slippage in Asian studies over the past decade. But we have a lot of work to do even to point in the right direction, let alone come anywhere near to achieving such a reasonable goal.

A key shaper of public opinion on these matters is the media. If reporters and commentators don't bother to get the names of the region's top people and places correct, opting instead for their own imagined pronunciation, then Australians will be left feeling that it's not a challenge worth taking seriously.

Only weeks out from the Beijing Olympics, China's capital is still commonly mispronounced (think of Jing as in Jingle Bells and you'll be safe). True, there are many outstanding performers, such as the ABC's Beijing correspondent, who takes great care. But equally there are others who feel no obligation to get it right, like his counterpart in Tokyo, who's lived there for a few years. He managed up to three mistakes in most of his reports on the PM's recent Japan trip: the name of the Japanese Prime Minster, that of the Emperor, and then Hiroshima. He inserted an emphatic ROSH into that name, something that might cause the Japanese to laugh to themselves but for the human tragedy that occurred there.

Hiroshima is written with two Chinese characters. Hiro means wide or spread out, while shima means islands: in effect, a flat, basin estuary.

The most universal mistake in Australia's Asian lexicon would have to be Taiwan, which is regularly pronounced as Taiwon. Won, of course, is the currency unit of South Korea. Think of One - as in 1,2,3 - and you'll get it right.

All of this may sound petty to the average Australian, but in Asia it rarely passes unnoticed. It is seen as reflective of a widespread attitudinal problem on our part: we simply don't care because we believe we'll be able to define a reality of our own choice in the region.

A good place for Kevin Rudd to start might be with his own government, ensuring that none of his ministers offends on this front. Most commonly do. He might then work his way round the senior ranks of the bureaucracy.

Australians who are attracted to Asian studies will inevitably have to toil away at one or more of the region's languages. And the one thing that will hamstring them - before they even start - will be the abysmal grounding in English grammar that they're endowed with by Australia's school system. Let's face it, you ever only realise how fundamental your home grammar is when you study another language, especially one from a vastly different cultural or civilization bailiwick. Put simply, you're floundering without it.

For most of us, that's the beginning of the Asian studies process. Few of us are lucky enough to be born to parents posted in the region.

But what of the end? Do we simply arrive at a point of Buddhist nirvana where full fluencies flourish and Asian mind-reading becomes a piece of cake?

It's hardly as straightforward as that. There's no one destination, unless of course, you have a specific aim like becoming a simultaneous interpreter. In that case, perfection is pretty much your goal. For the majority though, you don't necessarily know when you've arrived. You just keep going.

This was brought home to me recently in a conversation with an Australian woman who's had a lot to do with Japan. She's been married to two Japanese and is bringing up children from both relationships. She lives in Tokyo and has a sophisticated knowledge of both the language and the customs that go with it.

A short time ago, at a mother's meeting there, she said she sat back and listened, appreciating at long last that while she was fully acquainted with all the subtleties of the language and the people, she was simply never going to become a full Japanese. It had nothing to do with not being accepted. Her local community had taken her in with open arms.

"I suddenly realised," she told me, "that there's actually no end point. I'd just kept going all these years, assuming that at some stage a bell would ring and I'd know that I was over the finishing line and into a land of cultural bliss."

Back at the start of the game we need to discuss with young Australians what it is that they expect to achieve, how to watch out for key sign posts along the way and how to enjoy progress as it's made rather than miss it because they're busy scanning the horizon for a magical pot of gold.

Warren Reed was a postgraduate scholarship student in the Law Faculty of Tokyo University 35 years ago, where a fluency in written and spoken Japanese was essential. He has since been involved in intelligence work, business, writing and media commentary, and along the way has also studied Chinese, Indonesian and Arabic.