Chinese as the new lingua franca

I had the opposite experience in Switzerland, in a town near StGallen, in May. My collegue and I went to a "Chinese" restaurant. I tried to order in Chinese but the waiter explained that he was from the Phillipines and did not understand a word of Mandarin. The rest of the crew spoke either cantonese or worse: Switzerdeutsch. ;) But a significant portion of the students in Stuttgart speak pure Mandarin (German less so). If this development continues I need to hurry up because in a couple years I will need my Mandarin for lecturing...

London chinese/japanese restaurants all tend to be run by Chinese, especially the chain restaurants.. so you can speak cantonese/mandarin in them and they'll pretty much understand you. Koreans all run korean restaurants here, but they only seem to understand american english (even I have to point at the menu muttering pidgeon hangukmal ) and think everyone asian is korean (including my other half) which always makes me laugh.

Meanwhile, here's some vocab : Esperanto : 世界语 (Shìjièyǔ) Lingua Franca, according to Wenlin, with Google frequency: 交际语 (jiāojìyǔ) 2.3 millions 通用语 (tōngyòngyǔ) 98,000 - but that's the word for lingua franca according to Wikipedia 万国语 (wànguóyǔ) 1,500

When I went back to Chicago for a visit last year I found that I could do very nicely just by speaking Spanish. The town in Mexico where I live, Irapuato, in the state of Guanajuato, has a population of 460,000 but it is my understanding that there are more Mexican people living in the Chicago area than in Irapuato. Everywhere I went there were Mexican people who were delighted that I spoke to them in Spanish and they treated me like royalty. For all of the ChinesePod people who live in North America it wouldn't hurt to give SpanishSense a try if you have not already done so just to brush up on your high school Spanish. A little Spanish will go a long way towards making friends and getting along with your neighbors :)

henning, What do you mean? "or worse: Switzerdeutsch. "?? Weren't you in Switzerland? What do you expect people to speak there? It's spelled Schyzerdütsch, by the way, with slight alterations depending on dialect. And probably these poor people were actually speaking German. Only, our accent tends to be so strong that Germans think they are hearing Schwyzerdütsch. - It's like a person from Sichuan trying to speak Mandarin...

wildyaks, I was just joking ;)

...or a person from Laurentides / Northern Quebec speaking French (embarassing experience for me there, gave up after asking them to repeat for the 3rd time)

of course, henning, I know... Did I sound that serious??

wildyaks, actually it is way to easy to become offensive in a multilingual, written medium. Learned that lesson before...

Sorry if I was offensive. I had no intention to be. None at all

Most of the foreign population here in Harbin is made up of Koreans and Japanese. I've also heard that for a Korean to get a good job back home (and even to enter most good universities) they have to speak Mandarin. Maybe this trend will continue, particularly throughout Asia, in the future?

...Schyzerdütsch...

Henning and Wildyaks, I'm excited to learn that Germans have a sense of humor! Clearly, I was misinformed. The stereotypes are untrue! So many forms of humor don't translate to second languages including deadpan and sarcasm. I'm laughing my ass off at Schyzerdutsch.

All of the Japanese restaurants in my hometown are run by Chinese. I speak some Japanese so I alway try to order in Japanese to get them going. Koreans are here in China by the hundreds of thousands. All university language programs are full of them. Some of them speak pretty decent Chinese as well.

That's not exactly the same subject but it's interesting to know how to say Pidgin in chinese : 皮钦语 (phenotic) or 混杂语 mixed languaged or 洋泾浜语 (could also chinese describe dialects) But Wikipedia says : 在中国，最著名的皮钦语当为“洋泾浜英语”。 How would you translate that ? ; ) http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9A%AE%E9%92%A6%E8%AF%AD

Please stop it ! What should have been spelled "Schwyzerdütsch" now evolved into "Schyzerdutsch", which sounds not much better than "Scheisser-dutch"

Is 门槛精 an english pidgin in chinese or an item the english lingua franca ? 门槛精 is the phonetic equivalent of MonKEY精. MonKEY精 is the chinglish of 猴子精 猴子精 meaning clever (as a monkey)

Btw I've just learned another funny chinglish word. 牛B sounds like Newby but means Cool (great). Is there a webpage somewhere giving info on this sort of words ?

Thanks, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_slang

Argh! No, no. I have been offensive by carelessly making fun of Switzerdeutsch... :) See, what I mean?