Learning chinese difficult with locals

[Liao]

@headhonchoII

I’ve been working in a Taiwanese working environment for quite a while but my Chinese is still pretty poor.

I’ve read that some people here say that having Taiwanese friends is the best way to learn Chinese.

I would never be able to make friends for the sake of learning Chinese like that. That seems to me to be using them.

I find most Taiwanese quite boring and interested in stuff that is different from me- working hard all day, KTV, family stuff, shopping, playing computer games (I’m not including Taiwanese girlfriends in this analysis). They don’t really play sports and don’t like going to pubs so much. For economic reasons most of the population has not travelled very far so we dont have much to talk about in that sense.

A lot of the men seem to be intimidated by western males so only girls in general hang out with foreigners. I can’t have many girl friends because I have a girlfriend already so that cuts me out of most opportunities to hang out with locals.

The other problem is that the Taiwanese friends I have are my friends BECAUSE they are more open and international and as a matter of course speak English well. The only real Taiwanese friends I’ve had have lived or studied overseas or are western style with great English. My other friends are all westerners. English speaking westerners. The non-native English speaking westerners tend to be very cliquey and not very numerous, if we meet we will always use English and not Chinese.

This is the conundrum of the situation. How the hell to learn Chinese when you don’t really connect with a large proportion of the population and the portion you do connect with speak great English?

I am a local Taiwanese male working in an English learning publishing company. I used to be an English major and interested in linguistics; therefore, I’ve always trying to improve my English.

Before I started this job, I looked forward to it, because I thought I would get a lot of chances to practice English with foreign English editors. However, it was another story after I started my job. Culture gap deterred my friendship with foreigners. I found the philosophy of getting things done is often different between Chinese and foreign colleagues. And supervisors of the company usually treat local and foreign employees differntly. In my company, one of the supervisor trains her local subordinates to report the strengths and weakness of the foreign workers. It seems as if they were spied on by the locals. How could you expect you could earn friendship with locals in this kind of working environment?

Given that “racism” (as one of my Canadian co-worked call it), language is still a problem that causes misunderstanding. I always want to share life experiences and philosopy with my foreign coworkers, but I just can’t make it with my limited English proficiency. Any way, I thinky deeply in Chinese, but speak poorly in English. I think that’s how you feel most Taiwanese are boring.

I can appreciate how you feel, because I’ve also tried hard to get along with foreigners in Taiwan. I think it is really hard to cross the culture gap. All you can do is be friendly and be patient.