"Do you speak Chinese?"

This is one of the most frequent questions that I get from students, along with Can you use chopsticks? (do I look like I'm starving?) and Do you like China? (do you think I would have come back if I didn't?) and Do you have a boyfriend? (no).  

It is not the most straightforward one to answer though.  My general answer is "A little."  However, students' interpretation of what "a little" means varies drastically.  My spoken Chinese is honestly really pathetic and something that I need to invest a lot of time in if I plan to come back to China for longer.  My comprehension of Chinese is better and has definitely improved this year, but there are always a lot of variables, like what the topic of conversation is and how much context I have and how thick the speaker's accent is.  

I have always operated a lot by trying to understand the context, no matter what language is being spoken, and I definitely exploit that in listening to Chinese.  When Cassie and Alicia and Jonathan and I were hanging out last week, looking at pictures from traveling, Alicia pulled up her pictures from Macao.  She and Cassie were discussing something in Chinese and these are the pieces of that conversation that I understood.

"Xibanya" [Spain]

"bu zhidao zenme shuo..." [I don't know how to say it...]

"It was settled" (see, I'm forgetting English... I meant colonized!) "by Portugal," I said.  "The English name for that country is Portugal...."

"You understood us?"  Cassie asked, floored.

Yeah, not really.  I understood that the context was Macao and then they were talking about something related to Spain that they didn't know how to say in English and I made a wild guess that it was Portugal.

Welcome to my life in China.  

Two more moments from today.

At lunch with some of Depreena's students, Jan was astounded that I knew the word la (spicy -- a VERY important word to know when ordering food) and that I knew the word suan (sour) was part of the compound word for yogurt -- "suan nai"... literally "sour milk".  (Appetizing, right?)

"Can you read Chinese?" she asked, pointing at a sign in the dining hall to test my abilities.  "What do the yellow ones say?"

[Please bear in mind that she is a freshman student having an extended, lunch-long conversation about a variety of subjects with us in English, and clearly is quite competent.  My Chinese is nowhere near that level of proficiency.]

"Um, fruit," I said, chickening out of trying to say it in Chinese even though I think I know the words for both of the characters.  

"WOW," Jan said, looking at me with a lot of shock.  "Your Chinese is so good."

"Jan," Depreena said firmly.  We're trying to teach critical thinking skills along with spoken English, and this was a great opportunity.  "It's a fruit stand."

Which is precisely how I had learned those characters... from seeing them hundreds of times on fruit stands.  

Anyway, that was lunch... impressing someone else's students with how awesome my Chinese is.  

Then there was dinner.

At dinner I was eating with my student Lola and a few of her friends.  

"Do you go outside to shop?" they asked.  I'm not sure how they think it's possible I would have been on campus since August and not gone outside the gate to a store.

"Yes, of course," I said.

"ALONE?" they asked, eyes widening.  

"Yeah," I said.  Going to Qinhuangdao alone would have been interesting, but I'm pretty confident in my ability to get to the nearby markets and back without mishap.

They marveled for a minute about how difficult this must be since I can't speak Chinese and since communication is so important (guess what class was about this week... yes, communication) and so on.

I tried defending myself. "I can say some things."  I can never remember which classes think I'm fluent and which ones think I know no Chinese.

"For example...." said Lola.

"Things like how much does it cost and that's too expensive!" I said, an answer which usually they laugh at and are satisfied with.

"But not everyone speaks English," she said.

I laughed.  "In Chinese I can say those things, of course," I told her, and then had to demonstrate to prove it.  She still wasn't very convinced and the next questions were about if I knew how to get back to campus when I went out.

Yes... taxis in Changchun are not too rare and I can say Huaqiao WaiYuar like a native DongBeiRen (north-easterner).  Okay, well maybe not quite like a native, but it does generally get me back to campus.

Do I speak Chinese?

Still open to debate, obviously.