cute chinese ?

[xtenhome]

I am in china.

Some chinese just told me I spoke "cute" chinese. actual ke ai.

What is "ke ai" chinese ?

Also just venting but I do not feel like I am making any progress in chinese.

Can speak conversationally and also watch movies without problems. Have some problems with understanding all of news, maybe 50 percent. But feel stuck and not making progress.

Speak only chinese in house, watch chinese movies, sing chinese songs.

What else ?

Thanks !

arch

[Mugi]

A general case of 洋味儿?

Do you have a Taiwanese Guoyu accent?

Have you learnt a lot of your Chinese from a girlfriend/wife or female friends?

Or are your tones/pronunciation just a little off?

Or perhaps your grammar, while technically correct, is not quite natural?

I think any of the above could sound 可爱.

Speak only chinese in house, watch chinese movies, sing chinese songs.

What else ?

Read. Read as much as you can. Reading is a great source of new vocab and sentence structures and reinforces stuff you've heard already. Of course you'll come across a lot of 书面语, but trying to use new vocab in conversation that you've picked up from reading and finding out what works and what doesn't is a good learning process.

Sometimes taking a break is a good thing too - don't know if its feasible for you or not, but heading out of country for a couple of weeks and only speaking English usually refreshes my mind. I liken it to running your computer with Windows - if you leave it on all the time it gradually ties itself up and gets slower and slower to the point of freezing up. You need to defrag and restart it now and again.

[Yuchi]

On top of what Mugi listed, I had a girl tell me my chinese was 'cute' when I tried to use an english expression in chinese.

Maybe you expressed yourself in 'english terms' rather than chinese?