In my arrogance, I would think "They live in America now, they need to learn English."
Yeah, I hear you there. That's part of why I resisted when my husband wistfully suggested that we look for work in Germany - I'm too chicken to move to a country where I don't speak the language at least fairly fluently. "Oh, but just about everyone in Germany can speak English," people tell me. Yeeah. That won't help much if they start talking to each other rapidly in their native tongue...
I admire you so much, by the way - Chinese has always seemed like one of the most daunting languages to me. I've studied Japanese, but Chinese has always seemed a little too, I don't know, big for me to handle. All the dialects, the complicated writing system... And yet there you are, managing to get along despite the language barrier. I don't think I'll ever manage to travel abroad without taking a ton of language classes first. ~_~;
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Yeah, I hear you there. That's part of why I resisted when my husband wistfully suggested that we look for work in Germany - I'm too chicken to move to a country where I don't speak the language at least fairly fluently. "Oh, but just about everyone in Germany can speak English," people tell me. Yeeah. That won't help much if they start talking to each other rapidly in their native tongue...
I admire you so much, by the way - Chinese has always seemed like one of the most daunting languages to me. I've studied Japanese, but Chinese has always seemed a little too, I don't know, big for me to handle. All the dialects, the complicated writing system... And yet there you are, managing to get along despite the language barrier. I don't think I'll ever manage to travel abroad without taking a ton of language classes first. ~_~;