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Topic: news Overcoming Adversity: 5 of the Most Common Fears of China Expats

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hiddenjelly
comment | 41224 | 0

That's a bit of a generalization. In my group of friends most of us can speak a decent standard of mandarin, at least enough to do our daily tasks and chat with people. Many foreigners are good at learning languages but we usually don't have the time to learn, for example if you work at an English school you are supposed to be teaching English all day, after that you have little time to study. I think most Chinese have a very poor understanding of foreign history, when they go outside to travel they are completely unaware of the significance of most cities/buildings. Foreigners do actually study "world history" during our schooldays (UK at least) and part of that includes learning about China and they dynasties all the way up to Mao and modern China. We are an honest straightforward people who will tell you if you have poor English in the hope that you will improve, often we sandwich the bad part between two good "You're pronunciation is quite good, but your grammar kinda sucks, you have some decent vocabulary though" rather than being told by Chinese "Ni de zhong guo hua shuo de hen hao!" after we say "ni hao", how can you know if we speak good Chinese just by saying hello. Have a conversation with me for 5 minutes then tell me if my Chinese is good or not. Finally I agree that many foreigners come here for travel and to play around, but 70% of them change their ways whilst here and decide to settle down here and make a life. I know this from personal experience.

Nov 07, 2013 12;22
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