It Isn’t All Foreign

Wandering through the heart of any larger city in China offers a westerner quite a number of surprises.  We expect to see something less modern, less western because of our pre-conceived ideas about what China should be like.  When we come upon KFC or Macdonalds, we were totally surprised, surprised enough to take these photos to send home.  It seems that there are KFCs and Macdonalds all over the place – no different than back at home.  We noted Pizza Hut doing a thriving business as well.

Some FTs we got to know in Changzhou rarely ate anywhere else as they needed this visual connection back to their home country.  What they had thought was Chinese food back in America and Canada had little to no resemblance to what they got to experience once they landed in China.  The shock was so disappointing that they soon avoided eating normal Chinese food as much as possible.  Of course, that only served to isolate these FTs even more than the inability to speak any Chinese.

That said, here are a few bits of Chinese that are useful if only to let the local people know that you respect them and their language.  Avoiding learning even a few basic expressions does communicate a message to these local people of ethnocentrism, a condescending attitude on the FTs part that says “I am too superior to you to waste my time learning the language of an inferior people.”  You don’t want to go there.

Last day I introduced the expression for hello – Nĭ Hăo.  If you click on the Chinese word, you will be able to hear it spoken.  Of course, once you’ve listened to the expression as many times as you want, don’t forget to click back to this page.   To ask someone “How are you?”  all you do is add the expression “mǎ” – “Nĭ hăo mǎ?”  The usual response is: “Wǒ hĕn hăo, nĭ ne?” –  “I’m very fine, and you?”  Now, for a bit of extra – Chinese characters:  Nĭ hăo > 你 好; “Nĭ hăo mǎ? > 你 好 吗; Wǒ hĕn hăo, nĭ ne? > 我 很 好， 你 呢？

Enough for now.  I don’t know if this is useful for you.  What I do know is that it is useful for me as I prepare to return to China.