Staring and speaking the language well

[adambsmurf]

I'm not going to boast but I think I've made quite a lot of progress with the language, and have only found that the better I speak it the more staring I get, and the more differently they treat me.

It angers me and I hate it.

Wondering if anybody has that experience.

[confucius]

You're going to get stares whether you speak Mandarin or not, but I don't understand how increaased proficiency makes your life more miserable.

[Guest mirela_violeta]

How come thay stare when you speak better? I think they stare if you speak chinese at all, like people stare here when they hear I learn chinese. But I got used to it. I'm quite surprized if someone isn't amazed when they hear I study chinese.

It happened to me once in the subway to meet a chinese women. She was asking me for directions. You should have seen her face when I started talking chinese...the last thing she expected in a foreign country was to find someone who could speak chinese and not be chinese for that matter. She was uite heappy about that. She asked me a lot of questions about my family...if I didn't know better I would have thought she was curious ta1ai4 guan 3xian2shi4( mind other's business) , but as I understood it's quite common for the chinese to ask things about your family matters and about your private life to get to know you better.

[adambsmurf]

>How come thay stare when you speak better?

I'd like to know the answer to that too, but I think it's because they simply can't believe that someone's Chinese can be so good. I've lived here for three years and studied it in America, Chinese is no longer much of a foreign language to me anymore, and it angers me that I get treated so differently, than say, a Korean person speaking Chinese.

Most of the conversations I have on the street go the way mentioned above, they ask me a lot of questions about my family and about why I'm here, which is very friendly and nice. Yet when you're in the hospital with a cold or when you're on the train or in the restaurant ordering food you don't want to become the center of attention, and quite frankly I'm insulted that I do.

I suppose what I'm really saying that I would like to be treated as just another stranger rather than the "foreign guest."

[roddy]

I would like to be treated as just another stranger rather than the "foreign guest."

You'll be lucky if you can reach this stage with your friends and colleagues, never mind strangers you come across every day. Foreigners speaking Chinese are still too rare, even in bigger cities.

[JoH]

That's an interesting question... do you really think that people stare more, or is it that you find it more annoying now that your chinese has improved? In general, I've found that people's responses have got better the more chinese I've learned. When I visit china now I feel decidedly more 'human' than the first time I went when I spoke virtually no chinese at all.

Of course, there are still a lot of starers who just can't seem to get their head around a foreigner speaking chinese ... but at the other extreme are those who seem to assume that everyone can speak perfect chinese and ramble on for ages when I can barely understand them! But I've also found a surprising number of people who manage to stifle their surprise and just talk to me. I really appreciate it when that happens.

However, I'm not living in china and I'm sure that makes a difference. If I were, it might get a lot more annoying. At the moment, I only spend a few weeks a year in china - speaking chinese is still quite a novelty to me, so I don't mind that other people find it strange too.

[ChouDoufu]

For some reason most foreigners Chinese tends to level off after a while and there are very very few who speak Cinese extremely well (or the number of foreigners who don't speak Chinese well is very large and increasing, so it seems like even fewer can speak Chinese well).

If it's any consolation they aren't staring at you because they think you're a peice of meat or something; they're just curious. You have to realize that there are people that watch TV shows whose whole purpose is to show foreigners speaking Chinese. Obviously there's a set of people very willing to stare at foreigners speaking Chinese if these shows are still on the air.

It's always tough being stared at and depending on my mood my reaction changes, but it's really inevitable in China at this point in time. Good luck getting used to it!

[confucius]

Don't get me started! OK, you want it anyway. Now let me tell you about laowai talent on Chinese TV and how it affects those of you who happen to be Caucasians (or Africans) learning Chinese.

If you reach a certain level of above average proficiency, then Chinese people will simply say your Mandarin is really not bad.

I call it the "zhen bu cuo" level.

If you attain the next higher level of fluency, then suddenly you are compared to the Canadian sensation Da Shan and people will ask you to immediately stop whatever you're doing and begin performing a xiangsheng crosstalk skit.

This is a Chinese cultural phenomena that I have witnessed time after time. The Chinese see Da Shan do the annual New Year's show and assume that any foreigner in China who speaks fluent Mandarin must be another cross talk performer just like Da Shan.

Likewise if you're on a long train ride and demonstrate any above average knowledge of Chinese history then there will always be that one Chinese guy who will immediately give you the most difficult question about the Nan-Bei Chao period in order to satisfy his desire to find something you don't know.

That's why it's so important to learn more than just one song in Chinese karaoke. If any Chinese catches you singing that song, no matter how easy it is (e.g. Wo Ai Beijing Tiananmen) then you better have at least two or three more in your repetoire because they will demand that you sing more and refuse to beleive that you only know the lyrics to one single song in the Chinese language.

There's a lot of lame laowai talent on Chinese TV, but there are just enough fluent folks that get their act rerun on every provincial channel to make the entire nation beleive that all fluent foreigners are capable of xiangsheng, Peking opera, and reciting Tang poetry.