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Comment by wonnage | Hacker News Reader

Apparently every English student in China learns the following exchange: How are you doing today? / I'm fine, thank you, and you?

I've had trouble explaining why this is a weirdly formal response that native speakers would probably never use. So it was somewhat amusing to find zero search results for this! (not counting partial matches). It seems like the first phrases you learn in any foreign language reliably turn out to be phrases nobody actually uses.

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Every English student in Germany too. At least it was like that when I learned English in school.

This seems to be so common that there are even a bunch of Youtube videos out there about this topic, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_53mo10_Mbk

I remember many years ago in Spain the most used book to learn English the first sentences were pretty much those and in one of the first lessons there was a sentence that became widely known: "My taylor is rich", it was synonym with studying English.

I guess they would only use English in formal situations like when you go to shops etc. in those cases that is a normal exchange in UK english

Can you elaborate a bit on why it's a weird response? What would be more appropriate? Non-native speaker here

It’s quite formal and ritualised in a language whose premier cultural exporter has been quite outwardly egalitarian since at least WWII.

It’s just old fashioned. If you’re on this forum you’ve read enough English you’re unlikely to mess up but

How are you?

Great thanks. You?

Fine, fine.

It’s scripted insofar as no one cares how the other person actually is and answering I anything other than a positive fashion would be a faux pas but everything after “How are you?” is fluid. You can also go even less formal, e.g. “How’s it going?”

"I'm fine, how are you?" or "I'm fine, what about you?" would both be more normal in my opinion.

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