We’re probably all somewhat familiar with “Engrlish”, that crazy mistranslation of English in Asian countries. What you may not be prepared for is the reality of integrating into a non-English speaking country. It’s not necessarily as you might expect.
What you tend to find here in China is one of two things:
– people don’t speak English.. at all (except maybe a few select phrases), or,
– they speak English almost perfectly (you understand them with no issues)
There’s not much of a middle ground, not many folks who are at an intermediate level (at least not people we’ve bumped into). Perhaps people are shy to test out their knowledge of English on actual foreigners? We’re not too sure.
In any case, in the reverse scenario (you speaking Mandarin to them) it kinda goes like this:
You : <something something> (in what you think is close to textbook Mandarin)
Them: eh?
You: <less words, more basic. Dispense with attempts at proper grammar>
Them: OH : <what you said originally in Mandarin>
You: hada (OK)
They either understand you the first time, or not at all. It’s amazing. You’d think it would sound reasonably similar and they would use intuition to infer the meaning (based on context) but it is not so. Given the diverse meanings of phrases, you have to hit the tones exactly for the meaning to become obvious. Add to that any local dialect, and you can see that communication here is somewhat of an art.
It’s still quite possible to exist here on these terms, but you can imagine that a healthy knowledge of Mandarin can only help!
I suppose with time, it will get easier 🙂