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Comment by varajelle | Hacker News Reader

Easy: just learn Mandarin /s

And start talking in awful beginner's Mandarin during these conversations. The colleagues will inevitably switch back to English just after a few minutes of suffering.

Well, it worked for the guy who is bad at English!

Yup, all you need is the phrase "Excuse me but what does $word mean?".

This is of course the flippant answer but it’s not a bad one.

Like, why not? Speaking another widely used language is a really amazing experience and you have the hard parts out of the way which is an excuse to do it and people to practice with.

If it seems daunting remember that it’s something even the dumbest two year olds are able to figure out how to do, so you could probably figure it out.

Widely used… in China. Best bang for buck second language is Spanish

Maybe, but not in this particular case.

Counterpoint - learning Chinese as an adult who natively speaks English is incredibly hard. If you don't have enough motivation, it is a tedious slog that takes at least a thousand hours of work. I don't think "talking to coworkers" is enough motivation.

Totally agree. I would also like to add that, as a non-native, pretty fluent Mandarin speaker, it is pretty hard to chitchat with Chinese colleagues, especially when it is a big group and they come from different parts of China.

I speak Japanese but similar experience. One on one is fine but a group of native speakers together is hard mode!

> If it seems daunting remember that it’s something even the dumbest two year olds are able to figure out how to do, so you could probably figure it out

Language acquisition skills are normally way better in early childhood.

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