Arabic and Chinese

[fusu]

Flash,

You bring up a good point and one left unaddressed in my intentionally caviler post. The reality is probably even less than 53% of Chinese nationals can communicate in the Mandarin you understand. Sh-t when I was studying at Nanjing University, i saw two Chinese guys in the same city who couldnt understand on and other. The cab driver kept saying “speak mandarin”, and the guy kept speaking his version of mandarin back. I couldn’t fully understand either of them. That said, as I hope you will agree, if you can speak text book Mandarin and English fluently you're pretty well set. At the very least the internet in China runs on mandarin.

fusu.

 

[phrogpilot73]

It's college. Do what you like.

Hands down the best advice in this thread...

 

[insanebikerboy]

Flash,

You bring up a good point and one left unaddressed in my intentionally caviler post. The reality is probably even less than 53% of Chinese nationals can communicate in the Mandarin you understand. Sh-t when I was studying at Nanjing University, i saw two Chinese guys in the same city who couldnt understand on and other. The cab driver kept saying “speak mandarin”, and the guy kept speaking his version of mandarin back. I couldn’t fully understand either of them. That said, as I hope you will agree, if you can speak text book Mandarin and English fluently you're pretty well set. At the very least the internet in China runs on mandarin.

fusu.

That brings up a good point about languages in general, or at least level III languages. I saw it all day long with Thai when I was there, but the stuff you learn from books/schools/Rosetta Stone/etc doesn't translate too well into the street language. Hell, we had a guy who went to DLI for Thai and he had difficulty talking to the people there! Funny how day to day speech is so much different than the classroom versions.