It’s no secret that when traveling to a foreign country, especially one that speaks a different language, you will hit a couple of speed bumps. Whether it’s on the base or in the city, we do indeed run into communication problems. On the base, we sometimes have difficulties relaying our wants and needs. For example, our experiments require that the bears be moved either inside, outside, or into their neighboring pen. While our experiments are going, the keepers are cleaning the animal’s pens and cages. Some days they don’t even notice us up on the roof as they have their eye on the prize (a clean pen). When this happens, we try to tell the keepers how long we need the bears to stay outside to finish that leg of the experiment. Due to the language barrier, our words are often lost in translation. Either they think by “10 minutes” we mean “5 minutes” or we think they understood us and are surprised when they move the bears anyway. That’s okay though. The keepers do their best to help us and we appreciate it more than we will ever be able to express.
Some of the keepers that help us throughout the day
In the city or at restaurants, though, it’s a whole other story. We think we are saying one thing and they hear something completely different or vice versa. Like that one time we thought we were ordering fried rice but then they brought out chicken livers (haha!). Despite these issues we sometimes have, we’ve still been able to learn a lot about the language here in China. We can count to ten, ask how much things cost, and even order our own food (something we used to rely on Meghan for)! We’ve even made new friends. It’s been a wonderful time learning about the people and the culture here firsthand. Even if things are lost in translation.
The first meal we ordered all on our own!
My favorite little friend we’ve made
If you guys have any funny stories like these feel free to share in the comments! Thanks for reading
-Haley
The only things I can say Chinese are, “I want to go to Chengdu to see giant pandas” “Hi” and “Thank you” and if I look at my notes, “Happy New Year”! so see how well you guys are doing! I am so proud of you all and so happy for your adventures! Keep up the good work!
Sincerely, JoAnn Haynes Mann
Maybe you could have someone translate some frequent requests and put them on flash cards or something so you could be sure of what you’re asking them?
Challenging, no doubt–but pandas!
I have a small pre-travel “course” that I provide interns with that has some common phrases. We also encourage use of and provide the ChineseSkill app (it had a panda as the icon and I think does a great job of giving a “crash course” in Chinese) but . . . Chinese is HARD! And all of our available resources are Mandarin which is pretty different from the Sichuanese spoken at the base so it can be hard to develop an ear for it even when students are good and studying up prior to the internship 🙂
Hi Meg–
But maybe sometime you could get someone at the base to write out things like “5 more minutes” or “wait!” or “where are you taking that panda” or “can I please take that cub home with me” or whatever the most common requests are and make up signboards that the keepers can read. I know, it’s more stuff to lug around and the keepers are possibly too far away to read anything but a large sign, but there must be some way.
Maybe just jumping up and down and flashing 5 or 10 fingers?
Chinese is hard indeed! I have Chinese friends and coworkers and try to listen in hopes of some clues, but it’s still pretty mysterious!
I know you’ll figure something out.
Take care
Frances
Yes! That would be useful and we’ve employed this method in the past with personality trials 🙂 It definitely helps to have something explained in Chinese! These are great suggestions!