Cheffe jr. himself has never bothered about learning even any single word of Chinese (except for “Good day”, “Thank You”, etc.). Like most aliens in China, he only crouches over his work, and after work he preferably sits together with his peers (apart from his family), where he needs to learn, of course, no Chinese.
His plant manager, an American, is a very interesting person: Whenever I talk to him, he criticises China and the Chinese around him. The craftsmen are all bad, everybody is late, everything is supplied too late and in too poor quality, service is atrocious, at his home everything breaks and nothing is ever repaired, workers and staff are terribly unreliable and all the time must be either fired or leave anyway on their own.
Strangely, such experiences I have not had till now. Are we speaking of the same country? I have found very good companies as suppliers and partners, and staff who are reliable and deliver the best work and are endlessly helpful. Did this guy have just bad luck? Or is his perspective limited by prejudice? To snap at the Chinese in the company the manager does not need no learn Chinese, on American it has the better effect anyway, and if the Chinese understand only a quarter of it, the damage is not so serious, you might say.
Occasionally I notice on flights within China some foreigners who seem to speak fluent Chinese (in any case, far better than I do), read the Chinese newspapers ... Then I am annoyed about my too-slow pace, my inability to understand Chinese sufficiently that is spoken at standard speed. It spurs me to learn even more intense.
So my learning speed, in my view, is far too slow, but I must also consider that I am now twice a grandpa who learns just slower than young spring-chickens can. At least I know now about 700 characters, on the computer I can write in Chinese everything that I can speak and understand, but I cannot read as well by far.
All the more it makes me angry when a training lesson drops from the schedule. One Sunday LiLin does not appear at all, I do not reach her by phone, not even during the following week. Is she gone? During the week I search the web and find an alternative within a few days – ZhangMiao.
Another few days later I find out that my first teacher was with her boyfriend on the road. I am angry that she had not told me in advance, she had just forgotten and apologises verbosely. Yet I am definite: I will not tolerate that, I want reliability, at last she understands but I am not going to change my decision. Her final words are: “I understand now that you really mean business and want to have in any case the lessons, no matter what. I’m sorry, I will observe this more from now on with my other students.”
ZhangMiao has since been my teacher, she is very professional and makes me feel progress in conversation, grammar and characters. I can perform ever better in daily conversation, but technical or business subjects I may still not treat in Chinese. Once Chinese have the impression that I speak their language (because my pronunciation is quite good), they start to talk enthusiastically, setting off at high speed, and cannot be disrupted by “man man shuo!” (“Talk more slowly, please!”). And then I get nothing but a few dispersed words.
But at least I can deal with the daily life itself quite well by now, including dental visits, shopping, talks on the street, communicating with my football friends. I am able to trade Chinese SMS messages with my friends and my shady driver. My biggest difficulty is understanding. I can pretty well express myself (albeit with limited vocabulary and often un-Chinese sentence structure) and will be understood, but often I do not understand the Chinese, partly because they use words I do not know, but for the most part because they cannot be persuaded to speak slower. They think as I am “so good” at talking Chinese, I will understand just as well their own Chinese....