>>Once, in our hotel in Paris, I spoke to the old guy on reception in perfect French and he responded in equally perfect English - I found that to be really deflating.
In fact, my British friend, despite the remarks I made some time before, I, too, would find it deflating when any (supposedly white, because many of your European brothers and sisters are travelers, and they form a great majority at my place) random (so, they are..-->) travelers who would only bump into any one like me and speak English only. Sometimes I find it quite pointless, too, to learn anything beyond English. It could be a vicious spiral toward pure pseudo-bilingualism, i.e. non-Anglophones speak their native language natively + English (well, not well, however) somehow. This is especially discouraging for someone who can't expect to travel everywhere, unlike how some Anglophones are "depicted" by themselves to me as a viewer - I can see a lot of white travelers going to everywhere - from a modern city like mine to some really obscure Indonesian/Brazilian villages (or even Russian towns) that very few (Hong Kong) Chinese dare to go. Yes, this is a generalization, but yes, sometimes I find it discouraging when many (supposedly) Anglophones and Europeans speak multiple languages or perfect English.
That is to say, if you think I'm more childish than expected (as a frequent poster), here is my honest opinion: English itself, or the Western culture itself, is sometimes discouraging me. Or it may just be _me_ only, and while I don't what other peoples think, many (Hong Kong) Chinese find it very difficult to get the hang of ... anything from the r sounds, grammar concepts, slang...to cultural concepts of a great many foreign languages, most of which being European. Sometimes, I can even find that some of us are actually afraid of "foreigners" in a foreign land, like the US, since, for example, "they could easily get beaten by white or black Americans alike." Now, there must be some misunderstanding in it, I don't know, but there has been some fear among some of us... (in this case, not speaking good English is no.2 phobia among quite a few of us).
In fact, for this reason (again, this is my certainly biased view), I find it quite difficult to get a understanding between us - in general, between us and you Westerners (for simple cultural reasons, we pay much less attention to other peoples; again, don't pick me up for PC reasons, it's true...at least true for me).
Since I find it quite enjoying to discuss with you guys, I think I should be "very" honest this time, like a boy who tells you everything about his family... another observation of mine is: many of us may have the courage to pick up a few words of *another* foreign language, but even before that, we could already be worrying whether that would affect our Mandarin (many of us suck at it) and, ultimately, English (many of us also suck at it; it's even important than Mandarin here). So, I wonder whether other foreigners share this view - the fear of "English" when they are _already_ considering another foreign language.
And with our (generally) shaky English, we, too, expect others to speak English. Again, sometimes, we think our language is more like _____ (any less spoken European languages, and more popular ones to a lesser extent), and actually even much more "difficult". Some of us even use English instead of Mandarin with other Chinese from "China". In fact, as I would expect, you Anglophones should be optimistic enough not to be too hard on yourselves - there are quite a few so-called bilinguals in Far East who think they are very much linguistically challenged, likewise.
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