Communicating While in Asia
Frankly, it's not that easy
We have all learnt languages. When it comes to using them, can we breeze through or do we have a lot of difficulty?
Without going into cultural differences, we can all prepare before a trip to Asia, even though it's been years since we've studied the language.
Learning a language is also a considerable investment of your time and money. You want to practise speaking and not end up with all the other tourists.
Even though a lot of different dialects are spoken, you should be able to get through using the official languages. With Chinese, learning to read and write is important as words are written using the same characters regardless of the dialect/language. Even Vietnamese was once written using Chinese characters.
When e-mailing or writing letters in Chinese, you also have to get used to formal phrasing. Or maybe, I'm not so subtle and they are being very polite.
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