Calculation and Listen--Respond to Mother Tongue

As foreigners may expect, there is no difficulty for a Chinese native to communicate in China. However, if one is living in China for a long period, such as I myself, still he/she will find several differences between languages people use here. That is related to the amount of characters used in a sentence and the accent each character pronounced.

Generally speaking, in China, the length of one sentence or how many characters use in a statement decides whether the conversation is formal or not. For example, young peers and friends often greet with each other by expressing one character or two characters sentence, which is as same as people do in the western culture, such as “hi, there”. However, if the situation changes, as the communication partner turn an elder generation or our grandfather, for instance, the result of short sentence will be less formal and even disrespectful. This reminds me of a terrible conversation with my mother. Once she asked me if I wanted to shop with her, I just simply responded “Bu Qu!”(It’s “No” in English). Then she fell in silence for a couple of minutes and showed a little angry at my simple reply, which made her think of my impatience.

As another important factor, it is the accent that can explain the differences of languages in my life in China. People in one place here speak in one form of dialects which may be different from other places. Therefore, when one walking in the street hears somebody is talking in the same dialect from his/her home, he/she will be more active to communicate with the person who is talking than others who have different accent. Take myself as an example. The first day I came to the US I happened to meet a boy who was from Xi’an, the same place I lived in China. We talked a lot about the feeling of first impression in the US and all had a good time. However, besides him there is another Chinese boy who came from the Southern part of China and had a totally different accent in speaking. As a result, I could hardly understand what he said and even felt embarrassed on him.

Above all, calculation of the length of each sentence and listen to the accent of every character are important to communicate with people surrounded me in China.