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China Elevator Stories
“Is Learning English Hard For You?”
I chat with a cab driver in Shenzhen about learning languages.
09/01/2014
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
For Mid-Autumn Festival 2013, I fly from Shenzhen to Kunming to visit friends and attend a wedding. To get to the airport, I take one of the black cabs in Shenzhen. It’s usually easy to find one near my home, as they are often parked downstairs waiting for passengers.
The driver of this cab is a friendly Chinese man in his 50s. After I tell him my destination, he asks:
“How long have you been living in China?”
I reply: “I’ve been living here for two years.”
“Have you studied Chinese?”
“Yes, I have.”
He responds: “I thought so. It would be quite surprising if you could speak Chinese at this level without having studied it. Are you from the UK or the US?”
“Neither. I’m from Austria.”
He then asks: “Do you speak English?”
“I do, but my mother tongue is German.”
“How did you learn English?”
“I learned it at school, similar to how Chinese kids learn English at school.”
He inquires further: “Is learning English hard for you?”
I explain: “Generally speaking, the closer a language is to your mother tongue, the easier it is to learn. German and English are different, so you still have to put effort into learning English, but they are related languages. English and Chinese, on the other hand, are completely different, so it’s much harder for Chinese people to learn English than for Austrians. Japanese, however, is more similar to Chinese than to German, making it easier for Chinese people to learn Japanese than for German native speakers.”
He asks: “Do you think that this is also because Chinese and Japanese culture are more similar to each other than German and Japanese culture?”
“I don’t think so. Japanese makes use of Chinese characters, which is one of the reasons that makes Japanese really challenging for German native speakers to learn.”
What is your view on this?
This is part of the series ‘Conversations with Locals in China,’ where I share conversations with Chinese people on my blog.