What do chinese say when you speak chinese to them?

[Guest Yau]

With reference to Practicing Chinese with Chinese is impossible, it seems to me that chinese always feel surprised when a foreigner speaks their language.

When mon professeur francais try to explain a french word---- in chinese, to be clear, in a chinese character, the class WOWED on it, clapped hands. Seemed my professeur just finished a mission impossible, to conquer one of the most difficult languages.

It also happened a few years ago. I sat in a communication talk, the american speaker said the key to communication is "to put yourself in other shoes". A moment later, he added in cantonese that: 咁即係話, 牛唔飲水, 唔禁得牛頭低. (literally means 'you can't make a bull drink if he doesn't lower his head--- an idiomatic cantonese expression ) You can imagine the response.

[confucius]

When George Bush gave a speech at Beijing's Qinghua University he tried to sound clever and insert a Chinese word into it. I guess he was trying to obtain the same effect with a young Chinese audience.

The only problem is that instead of saying "China can be a 'da guo',... a great country" he said "China can be a 'dao gua'..." which to the best of my interpretive abilities translates as "an upside down melon"

[xuechengfeng]

hahaha

[高可文]

Once when I was eating in a chinese restaurant with my father he asked me how to say thank you. I told him how, but warned him that he had to pronounce it correctly or he could end up talking about shoes. Instead of 谢谢 though, he said 食死, to the amusement of the waiter he was trying to talk to.

[holyman]

well, they never knew i was a foreigner in the first place. only when i keep quiet and bow/nod my head sometimes i was mistaken as a japanese. it's pretty amusing when i go to liulichang. those touts starts displaying their wares and speak to me in japanese 'cheap, very cheap'. after they continue blabbling a while in japanese, i asked them 'zheige dou'r qian'. then they'll look at me and say '你是中国人？你是中国人？'. just happily walk away and leave them staring...

[Quest]

well, they never knew i was a foreigner in the first place. only when i keep quiet and bow/nod my head sometimes i was mistaken as a japanese. it's pretty amusing when i go to liulichang. those touts starts displaying their wares and speak to me in japanese 'cheap, very cheap'. after they continue blabbling a while in japanese, i asked them 'zheige dou'r qian'. then they'll look at me and say '你是中国人？你是中国人？'. just happily walk away and leave them staring...

[pazu]

This is common and sometimes can be annoying. I travelled quite extensively in China and I always met some people trying to tell me something in Japanese, and then left immediately when I spoke to them in Chinese, as if only the money of Japanese was easy to be "squeezed".

[holyman]

the worst part is when they grab ur arm or shoulder. these people got no respect for others at all. they simply cant leave people alone.

misunderstandings do happen btw local chinese too. once i was on a bus. 2 countryside young men from other province board the bus, wanted to pay for 2 tickets. the conductor didnt catch their accent and gave them 3, keep the money for the extra ticket too. the 2 guys thought they were cheated and started to bombard the conductor with furious words. conductor blamed them for not speaking putonghua properly, they answered in their heavy accent, 不是普通话难道是英语？（if its not mandarin, do u think we are speaking english）. conductor says sarcastically, 哦，那就是我耳朵有毛病。（yeah, putonghua, then probably my hearing is bad）. then other passengers started laughing...

[Ken]

When President Kennedy spoke before huge crowd in Berlin, he said

"Isch ben ein Berliner". (pardon the spelling) Everyone cheered.

Translation: "I am a jelly doughnut." I would have cheered, too.

[Tsunku]

There seem to be enough foreigners around in Kunming that speak some degree of passable Chinese to where I don't get a huge response just from speaking normal putonghua, just the usual "your Chinese is so good, blah blah" ...

But if I bust out some Kunminghua you should see the reactions! Most people just can't get over the fact that a foreigner would bother to learn it, much less speak it properly (actually my km accent is better than my mandarin accent I think ).

Last week I went shopping for a cell phone at the second hand market here. I asked the guy "za ge mai" in kunminghua (how much is it?). He immediately shot back a much too high price and I scolded him for trying to cheat me, again in kunminghua. All the other vendors gathered around and started to laugh and encourage me. They were extremely surprised I understood what was going on. They scolded the first vendor for not respecting the language I was using!

Lots of kunmingese will try and use kmhua as a kind of "secret" language, expecting me not to understand. I can't really speak that much kmhua, but I can understand it almost as well as putonghua. My Chinese friends usually warn new people right off the bat that I can understand their kmhua, so they should be careful with what they say.

[Haoqide]

Being that I live in Nashville and thus I don't have a gigantic Chinese population to practice with like in NYC or LA, I try to eat Chinese food as much as I can so that I can practice at the restaurants. Invariably, I get the response, "你中文说的很好！你是在哪里学的?" and also "你去过中国吗？"

Of course, I realize I don't really speak that well, but it's nice to be complimented, anyway!