phone more?

[Scoobyqueen]

As title says

[Lu]

I see the same thing, Chinese contacts do a lot more by phone (preferably mobile phone). Which means you can also text, which can be very convenient. I think this 重phone轻email might also be the cause of people working for very serious businesses or government agencies seeing absolutely no problem in using a 163 or sina or hotmail address.

[Outofin]

I feel texting and group chatting are used even more than phone calls.

It's time to install WeChat on your smart phone.

I think emails are formal, cold, and accurate. Phone calls are intimate but sometimes cause misunderstandings. Texting is quick and effective because it saves all the costs for hellos and goodbyes.

[Cat Jones]

My colleagues are glued to their phones all day. Most business is conducted over the phone here.

I think the West prefer e-mail as there's a trail to follow - you know exactly what's been said and who is meant to be doing what. And you can refer back to it and say "I told you I was right"

It also gives you more time to think about the situation and respond accordingly.

[skylee]

Re WeChat mentioned in #3. I uninstalled it as the people I know don't use it. May I ask if WhatsApp and Line can be used in Mainland China?

It is a bit surprising that Outofin finds emails formal. Some of the organisations I deal with do not accept emails as formal documents. They demand letters with signatures.

[Cat Jones]

Yes you can use WhatsApp in China. I don't know what Line is though.

[imron]

It is a bit surprising that Outofin finds emails formal

I was also amused by this. To me, email has always been a relatively informal method of communication. Though of course, SMS, IM, Twitter and the like are even more informal.

[Lu]

Email can be as formal or informal as you want to, from Dear Sir... Yours Sincerely to quick two-word ones. But Chinese emails I see are almost always short, informal and to the point, with the formalities mostly reserved for faxes.

[liuzhou]

In my experience, most Chinese people seldom check their email / often forget their passwords / frequently change their provider. Everyone I know has several email addresses, none of which they ever check. I have to text them to tell them I sent an e-mail, and they ask "where to?".

Everything is done by phone (text or voice) and the dreaded QQ.

[gato]

It's probably part of a matter of those when people first started using the Internet regularly. For those who started using the Internet before IM and SMS became popular, email is more common. I'd bet young people in the West use email a lot less, too. Ask your neighborhood college kid.

Most people in China didn't start using the Internet until cell phone ownership was already widespread. Texting on cell phone was easier in Chinese than in the phonetic languages. You can type the same message using fewer keystrokes, which was especially helpful in the days before smartphones when you only had 10 keys to work with. There was less need for awkward abbreviations or using numbers instead of text. So for example, whereas SMS was also already popular in China in the early 2000s, it didn't become popular in the US until the last few years. When I was still living in the US in 2005, nobody I knew used SMS regularly.

[Scoobyqueen]

As title says

[frankwall]

Some cultures and certainly some individual people prefer to communicate verbally as it offers a lot of advantages. Also, in some languages, speaking is more efficient than writing text messages. If you look at statistics, China is set to become the largest global smartphone market by 2017. We may see more of a switch towards whatsapp and mobile internet usage as more and more people invest in smartphones.