First jobs

[geraldc]

I've just got my first job that requires me to speak Mandarin (albeit a temporary part time job)! The Cirque du soleil are coming to London, and the catering company requires someone who can speak mandarin to liaise with/assist the chef to the troup of Chinese acrobats. It's only a temporary part time job, but it does allow me to put on my resume/CV that the first job that required me speak Chinese was with a circus! Apparently the chef doesn't speak any English, so it will be interesting to see how my speaking and listening skills develop in the month we'll be working together. I really don't know any circus/acrobatics vocab so perhaps I should start brushing up in readiness.

It set me to wondering what were everyone elses first jobs that required them to exercise their Chinese skills.

[skylee]

CONGRATULATIONS. (Though I fell asleep watching Cirque du Soleil's show.)

This might be helpful -> http://education.xinlung.co.uk/info/articles/1032.html

Good luck.

[marcopolo79]

I'm a TA at 台大 for an American History class that is a selective open to non-native Chinese speakers starting their first year of univeristy. The textbook is in English, the lanugage of instruction is Chinese, and I can assure you that very few students have a full command of either language. I have office hours twice a week, and all I can say is that sometimes the language barrier between me trying to express myself in a langugage in which I have a decently high but far from complete level of proficiency and my students trying to absorb the material in a language they are somewhat familiar from a source in another language they don't completely understand can be an absolute bizatch, but if the will to express yourself is there then nothing is impossible.

I would highly recommend having a dictionary with you at all times, god only knows what kind of specialized vocabulary a Cirque De Soleil member might require.

All I know is no other experience has truly tested my abilities like this one, and I think that my recently improved ability to express somewhat more advanced and abstract concepts is directly tied to my experience in teaching this class.

[gato]

selective open to non-native Chinese speakers starting their first year of univeristy

What are some of nationalities represented among this group? Non-Chinese Asians?

[Lu]

Got a job thanks SARS :-)

When I had just returned from Beijing I was asked to interpret (not translate, my professor had already done that) for a Chinese poet, Che Qianzi, on the Rotterdam Poetry International festival (see http://www.poetryinternational.nl). My professor is specialized in contemporary Chinese poetry and I guess he would have interpreted himself, but he was braver than me so he was still in Beijing.

Anyway, it was really fun, plus I got to see the whole poetry festival, and I even got paid for it![/url]

[marcopolo79]

What are some of nationalities represented among this group? Non-Chinese Asians?

A motley grouping of ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia, Macanese, HongKongers, Koreans, and Japanese, with a few ABC's and CBC's thrown in for good measure.

[jz87]

Not quite a job but I was drafted to interpret for Wan Dang (the exiled TianAnMen dissenter guy) when he came to my university) I hadn't spoken Chinese for months so I was a bit nervous. And had a few bloopers, but the audience reacted well, I guess it's pretty funny when the interpretor makes an obvious mistake.

[wenjing*girl]

The only job that I ever got based on my Chinese "skills" was as a census taker in 2000. The whole time I did it, I didn't even meet one Chinese person. Good thing though, because my Chinese was pretty sucky then.