Learning their language part 2

As I mentioned earlier, Dalianese speak normal mandarin. But, for the central part of China aka places like Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, they are very proud of their local dialet and trust me, it sounded 100% like alien language. It wasn't hakka, hokkien, canton, teochew or whatever dialect you heard in Malaysia. I have no idea on what are they trying to tell us. And they dont speak in normal mandarin, they will ask question in their dialect and will automatically differentiate us from the local people. My friend and I keep telling them that we are from Guangzhou as we speak 100% like them. Well, its better than telling them that we are tourist. haha

But, we need to becareful at ShenZhen. To the people there, you will either be Mainland Chinese or HK chinese. But, how are they going to detect you? They will approach you with cantonese language ! Once you replied them in cantonese, you will be labelled as HK Chinese. We fell into the trap once and from that moment onwards, we replied them in mandarin regardless of the dialect they used to speak to us.

I spent 6 weeks with my homestay in Dalian and I spoke mandarin with them. The odd thing is that the more I speak in mandarin, the more I find that I speak exactly like a Hongkie. I was speaking the HK mandarin. It was so so bad that I wanted to stop conversing in mandarin so much after every sentence I spoke as it sounded very very funny. I bet they find it hillarious. :(

There's once when I told Chris to bring his pendrive/thumbdrive to my place later as I wanted to give him some videos. He doesn't know what is pendrive/thumbdrive as it is not the word used in China. They called it as 'U-plate( U 盘) in China. I didn't know what is U盘 and I thought he don't understand what I was trying to tell him. I told him to bring whatever he has and we spent time arguing which is the most appropriate word for thumbdrive.

Chris complaint to me that his friend were laughing at him when he answered his friend's question using the Malaysia mandarin. He claimed that he's a fast learner and I manage to influence his speaking in only a few days.

Ai Ling, who is also a Malaysian had another interesting encounter when she wants to reload her sim cards credit. She was used to the term '进钱' and none of them understood. She had to explained what she really meant. Then,only they realize that she meant '充值'. hahaa..This shows how bad our mandarin is.

That's all for today.

Till then.