Tongue Twister Lesson

Millions of Chinese have around one hundred and fifty words of English however, like any language skills if you don't use it you will lose it. If a Chinese can speak reasonable English it becomes a  great help with the job market. As you would expect many older Chinese have more skill with Russian language than English, these days as China becomes one of the worlds largest trading nations, it is essential that within a trading company you need some good English speakers.

Many western companies buying from mainland China have to go through Hong Kong agents because of the language difficulties. This means that the buyer is paying a middle man and not getting a very good deal. In fact if you can find a Chinese manufacturer who has an English speaker then, you have the potential to save big time.

Few westerners will ever be able to learn Mandarin it is a very complex language with a base of 4 tunes, in simple terms this means, even if you can communicate on a very  basic level you will never understand the full extent of Chinese language. One American diplomat thought his Mandarin to be very good until one day he asked for some water, guess what, he pronounced the word wrong and asked for something that would  make him immortal.

Many Chinese can communicate in the written word though, often have a Mandarin/ English dictionary on the PC, unfortunately, they will always select the most complicated English word, a word infrequently used in English. This makes communication slightly more difficult because the recipient of the message may not know the word themselves. It has happened to me on several occasions.

Another problem is this, there have been many cases of a westerner thinking his Chinese counterpart can speak English well when in fact they can not. This is the false impression given over the Internet using something like MSN or Yahoo.

I found myself in many business meetings with a translator, it wasn't until some time later that realised no one knew what I had said, while everyone agreed, the truth was the reverse.

If your translator is not so good and because you can't speak the language, how do you know your words are being translated correctly, you only find out when things go badly wrong.