Communicating in China

China is English crazy: all the young are learning English. Actually, it’s part of the governments five year plan. But the older generation does not speak much English so when travelling in China you will need to communicate in Chinese. Usually in restaurants and train stations (and other places) menus and signs are only written in Chinese - so you will have to ask people about the available options.

Grammatically, Chinese is quite simple; it doesn’t have all the a’s, the’s and to’s that English has. But it is a tonal language and if you don’t hit the right tones at the right time, people may not understand you. There are two ways to get around this:

The first is to try to speak whole sentences. When I was in Korea, I would say single words in Korean and people could understand me, but when I went to China and tried the same (with Chinese words, not Korean) it didn’t work because I couldn’t achieve the right pronunciation. But if you speak a whole sentence then there is more of a context for people to figure out what you are trying to say. The second thing is, to speak fast. Chinese people don’t pronounce every tone perfectly clear either, because they speak rather quickly. So if you do the same, there’s more chance they will understand.

Of course, your communication ability in Chinese will be very limited so a good guidebook and/or phrasebook with sentences written in Chinese will be very handy to stick in people’s faces and point to the sentence you need to convey. You want to avoid as much confusion as possible. Once I jumped in a taxi and said huoche zhan (train station) - after driving for 20 minutes in unfamiliar surroundings I thought I’d show the driver the map and it turned out we had been driving in the opposite direction.

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