u/DeesMandarinTea:
"This isn't about grammar or pronunciation, just a casual chat."
A Salary Question At The Table
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"Some of my students who live in China told me they've been asked things like \"How much do you make every month?\" or \"Are you married?\" and other questions that feel pretty personal. They were caught off guard at first."
u/Top-Bit-7164:
"asking your salary or whether you're married usually isn't nosiness, it's how people show they care and place you socially. with older folks especially it's basically small talk, same energy as 'nice weather today'."
Bread Is Not Bread
u/1lyke1africa:
"I think shock is a negative surprise, so: How terrible bread is. They don't really understand it, but it's very popular."
u/WuTaoLaoShi:
"the bread messed me up at first but I wouldn't say bad, you have to see it differently-in some parts of the world bread is a 主食 but here it's more seen like a dessert"
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"The bread one made me laugh because it's painfully true. Chinese bakeries make beautiful looking bread that somehow tastes like air and sugar and disappointment. I didn't understand what real bread was until I moved to Canada."
u/1lyke1africa:
"Biggest positive surprise: How varied Chinese food can be. You can have restaurants dedicated to each province of the sinosphere, and the food is very different, and extremely delicious."
Paying Is A Contact Sport
u/AffectionateTeach561:
"I've always been a friend that paid for everything without a fight, but to have to nearly tackle family members over the check is a HUGE culture shock. I've gotten good at slipping the credit card to servers, but once in awhile I still get caught."
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"It's basically a sport in China. You have to sneak off to the bathroom and secretly pay, or slip your card to the server like you're doing a drug deal."
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"If you get caught, someone will literally wrestle the bill out of your hand. And the winner walks back to the table looking very proud of themselves."
u/Inevitable-Self-2702:
"People would walk into the hotpot place I worked at and give me their credit card immediately. 'Charge me, don't listen to anyone else!' Like... You'll be here for 2 hours!"
A Few Is Not A Number
u/TheTackleZone:
"For example my partner will ask me how many of something, and like a good British person that doesn't want to impose the burden of exactness on someone I'll reply 'a few'."
u/TheTackleZone:
"And my partner will be like 'what is a few? 3? 5? Is it 6? Do you want 6 of them?' It breaks her brain, and then it breaks my brain that it breaks her brain."
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"In Chinese you'd just say 几个, but even that often gets followed up with '几个？3个还是5个？' We really do want the exact number."
Chinese Is Its Own Planet
u/Triseult:
"I don't know if this counts as a culture shock, but I'm forever fascinated by how rich and different Chinese culture is."
u/Triseult:
"But then Chinese is its own planet in comparison. Sometimes I'll hear a turn of phrase and go, 'I understand this perfectly, but I can't translate it simply in English.' One recent example was 等不到. Literally, 'I didn't wait to completion,' meaning essentially, 'I waited for you but you didn't show.'"
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"Chinese belongs to a completely different language family, so there are very few shortcuts from European languages. But that's also what makes it so fascinating."
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"The mistakes are actually clues to how the language works. It's like solving a puzzle in both directions."
The Label Does Not Disappear
u/DozingUnderTheSun:
"Also, reaching the point of literacy where I could read and understand pretty much 99% of everything I saw felt so surreal. Like, sure, I had some idea that Chinese literacy was possible, but actually achieving it did not feel real."
u/Early-Dimension9920:
"No matter how good my Chinese is, how much I try to play the Chinese culture game, I'm always 老外, and my son, despite being a Chinese national, because he looks more foreign than Chinese, is also always a 小老外"
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"The 老外 label really does stick, no matter what. You can speak perfect Chinese, know all the customs, play the game flawlessly, and somehow you're still 老外."
Hospitality Has A Clock
u/Confetticandi:
"For 12 days, from literal sunrise until after midnight, we had no notice and no say in what we ate, where we went, what we did, or even where we slept."
u/Confetticandi:
"There was one night I broke down in tears in the hotel because I was so exhausted and overwhelmed. I'm fortunate my wonderful husband decided to be the 'bad guy' on my behalf and firmly turn some things down to protect me."
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"12 days of no control over your own schedule, that's not hospitality anymore, that's being swept away by a river."
The Shock Can Be A Gift
u/1lyke1africa:
"Truly accepting and believing that you can read Chinese script, and it's as real and fully a writing system as the alphabetic one."
u/1lyke1africa:
"You can struggle with characters for a long time without 'hearing' Chinese, and Chinese 'thoughts' once I got past that, it was hard to remember how I could ever have felt that way."
u/DeesMandarinTea:
"Now that I'm really living in it, it still feels kind of magical. The fact that I'm communicating with people from completely different countries and cultures, in a language that's not my mother tongue, it honestly blows my mind sometimes."
Source: Original Reddit post by u/DeesMandarinTea in r/ChineseLanguage, with selected public replies quoted above. Quotes are preserved as personal accounts; this article does not present one person's experience as universal.