Speak to me By Kenneth Kagan
NEWSCHINA I May 2015
Few locals expect foreigners to speak Chinese at all, and the universal response of “Wow, your Chinese is really good!” is exhaustingly familiar to anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with spoken Mandarian
Illustration by Liu Xiaochao
“Why don’t any foreigners want to speak English with me?” a Chinese woman angrily asked me at a party I recently attended. “They all want to use their Chinese, but I never get a chance to speak English. Come on!” One American at the same party wasn’t convinced by her argument – he had come to China to practice Chinese, he said, arguing that it shouldn’t be a problem for locals to communicate with foreigners in Mandarin. “That’s not the point,” chimed in another local woman. “What if we want to speak to you in English? Truth be told, it’s hard to get by anywhere in China without speaking the local language, and sooner or later you’ll need to communicate with your cab driver, or your dentist. For that reason, a good number of foreigners come to China to master the language. While a huge number of people still regard Mandarin’s tonal system and thousands of characters as an unassailable linguistic obstacle, learners see it as a challenge. And when you’re already so far away from home, speaking English with the locals feels like a wasted opportunity. But in China, students start learning English as early as kindergarten and continue all the way until university. That doesn’t mean the average twentysomething can speak more than a few basic phrases, or even that they’d want to if they could: a survey by the 21st Century Education Research Institute revealed that up to 90 percent of Chinese people in full-time education “weren’t interested” in learning English. This is understandable – most Chinese students cram for thousands of hours in preparation for the arduous college entrance examination, and then forget everything immediately afterward. This leaves a huge number of poor souls who find, after countless hours of studying, that they don’t even get many chances to use the language that they supposedly mastered in order to get a degree. If they’re fortunate, they might get to travel abroad, or have a fleeting conversation in English at a party. In most cases, however, their second language, much like second year calculus, simply withers in their long-term memory banks.
Both sides, therefore, find ourselves at an impasse. How can two people have a conversation when neither wants to speak in a language they fully understand? I can entirely empathize with a Chinese person who is frustrated to speak in their mother tongue with someone who speaks a language they devoted years to learning, but never get the chance to use. Conversation comes at a premium for passionate language learners, and an interesting and patient language partner is very much the proverbial Holy Grail. I once had a part time job where my sole duty was to help high school students improve their spoken English. Once a week, I’d meet up with a girl in a café and talk about anything from the
weather to what was in her daily newspaper. What’s more, I got paid to do this, with no formal qualifications. Linguistically mismatched couples are a common sight in Beijing cafes, communicating in halting, broken sentences. I don’t know how many times people have sadly complained to me that they can seldom make “real friends” with people that seemingly only want to practice their English, or Chinese – a depressingly common complaint in an environment where the need to speak a foreign language often outweighs the desire to connect with native speakers. Some foreigner friends of mine take the effort to speak Chinese language learning to interesting extremes. Quite a few people I met on one language program shunned bar streets in an attempt to get a more “authentic” China experience. One friend even traveled to far-flung corners of the country in order to force himself to use his Chinese language ability in areas where nobody understood or spoke English. Others compromise: another friend regularly has discombobulating dialogs where he speaks Chinese and his language partner answers in English. Then, of course, there are the legions of foreigners in China who are quite happy to bluster along in English. It’s hard to imagine a fresh-off-the-plane banker expressing frustration that nobody wants to correct their tones in Mandarin. But when someone genuinely interested in fluency only elicits English-language responses from Chinese speakers, it can be particularly grating. Few locals expect foreigners to speak Chinese at all, and the universal response of “Wow, your Chinese is really good!” is exhaustingly familiar to anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with spoken Mandarin. My strategy is usually to fall back into the language that whomever I am speaking to feels most comfortable with – it might be less advantageous for language learning, but it’s better for cultural communication. Insight, awareness and knowledge are often more advantageous to one’s personal development than the language they are communicated in.
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