This afternoon, I was talking to a former employee on QQ (similar to Aim or skype in the states but very popular in China) she was complaining about her new job. There was one particular instance in general that she was complaining about. She had a problem with an American woman who she is organizing some papers for. The instance happened the day before and she sent me the online transcript of their conversation to see how I felt about it. When I looked it over I really thought that the American woman was not super polite, but she was not impolite in any way, except for one thing and I’ll explain that at the end. I was surprised at the reaction my former employee was giving until I thought of the situation from her, the Chinese employee point of view. To her the only other foreigner she had ever worked with was me and I made a special effort to communicate to her as if I was another Chinese person, not a foreigner as this person was. How is this communication different?  If I used English I would speak English as if I was directly translating it from Chinese to English. Let me explain this. In Chinese the word “very” is used for everything. It is not big, it is “very” big.  The reason fo
r this is without the word “very” before the adjective you do not know what the word is; the word very makes the sentence clear. With this being said I found in many situation, when I would use English-speaking in China, if I just said, “good” the person would think it meant bad. If I said “very good” they would look at it as if I just said good. This was the same though when I spoke to someone in Chinese. If I heard, “very good” it meant just “good” if translated into English. In the transcript I was looking at the American kept saying  that things were good, or just okay, which meant to my friend that it was barely acceptable. In the future though, my Chinese buddy knows that with most Westerners, good in English should translate to “very good” in Chinese. Another problem in the transcription the I saw was it was afternoon in the states where the American was, but 10:30 at night in China. Obviously my friend did not want to be there so late and in the transcription there were two occasions where the American asked for her to hold on a while so she could look for somethings. If I had to stay several hours after work to talk to someone disorganized I would get upset from this though. So I told my friend that this was the only part that might be considered rude and maybe the person was a little absentminded on this. After we talked my friend felt a lot better and I am sure will have better experiences in the future.