When I arrived in China in late February this year, I thought I would have no problem communicating with the people around me. I knew that I had been working hard to prepare myself for this year abroad, studying Chinese every day and attending extra tutoring sessions twice a week in college. Even so, there have still been some challenges that everyone who lives abroad has had to overcome.
With China being such a huge country, every region has their own distinct way of speaking, different habits and temperaments. Since Nanjing is a major city in the Jiangsu region, people from all over live and work here. This proved to be a bit of a challenge and even stressful at times because studying Chinese for a few years and now finding that I still can’t understand what some people are saying took its toll. Even things like making small talk with a taxi driver or talking on the phone with a company HR representative all proved to be different challenges. It could be incredibly overwhelming to he talking with someone and then they bring up something that I had not learned how to talk about in Chinese. When that happened, I had to turn to simple language to try to make t through the conversation!
After living in China for three months, I learned that there are over 200 different dialects of Chinese spoken!
