Illustration: Lu Ting/GT

Like many over-eager foreigners who expatriate to China do, I took private lessons to learn Chinese when I first arrived in Shanghai. Sadly, like many more foreigners, I seldom actually speak any Chinese here. In fact, I quit my lessons after a year and I haven't bothered to improve my Putonghua.

One of the reasons why I gave up is that I felt trapped in a vicious circle. At work, most of my Chinese colleagues speak decent English, which makes it unnecessarily complicated for me to attempt any professional discourse in Chinese. So because I never had an opportunity to practice the language, my spoken Chinese never improved, and because it didn't, locals could never comprehend what I was attempting to convey.

Most expats in the same predicament do try to at least learn some "survival Chinese," for instance, being able to order food or take a taxi. But even in these circumstances, it requires real effort for foreigners to get their meaning across.

I recently met an Italian man living in Ningbo and Shanghai for the past 12 years, which essentially makes him an "Old China Hand," a term that expats earn after their first decade here. He surprised me when he admitted that he also gave up on learning Chinese. It wasn't for lack of trying, he told me after I gave him a look. The reason? "No matter how well I'd speak Putonghua, the locals would just automatically wave me off saying 'ting bu dong, ting bu dong!'"

"Ting bu dong," which means "I don't understand you," is probably the most commonly heard response that foreigners receive from Chinese people when attempting to communicate with them. But - and this is important - it doesn't always mean that you, the foreigner, are not speaking the language correctly. More often than not, it means that THEY, the locals, are not trying to understand you.

During my first several years in China, I would often walk away extremely frustrated when a local would tell me "ting bu dong." I was absolutely positive that I was speaking the few phrases I had memorized correctly, with the intonations stressed perfectly, and yet nobody would bother to make the slightest effort to try to understand me. It's not that they couldn't - it's that they wouldn't.

One of my best friends in Shanghai, who is also French, has lived here for eight years. He attended Jiao Tong University his first six months in order to learn Chinese, so naturally he speaks Putonghua much better than I do. But even he rarely uses it, relying on his Chinese wife to do the talking, because he is so sick and tired of hearing "ting bu dong" from the locals.

"Ting bu dong," therefore, has very little to do with linguistics or semantics and more to do with age-old prejudices and small-mindedness. Just because I am a foreigner, many Chinese, most whom have grown up with little or no interaction with people of other nationalities, instinctively believe that they will not be able to communicate with me. Therefore they don't.

Recently I went to a restaurant with my Chinese wife, where I asked the waitress the most simple of questions about a dish on their menu. It was such a basic question that even a small child would have been able to understand what I meant. But this adult waitress - presumably a migrant from a rural village in some distant province - immediately looked at my wife with sheer panic in her eyes.

Meanwhile, imagine the same situation back in France, my home country. I'm a waiter and a group of Chinese tourists sit at a table, look at the French menu while simultaneously scrolling a Chinese-French dictionary app on their Xiaomi mobile, then ask in the worst-imaginable pronunciation "Ce plat est épicé?" I'm positive that, no matter how badly they mispronounced the words, I'd still be able to interpret, out of common sense, that they are asking me "is the food spicy?"

I get that Chinese is a difficult language for Westerners, largely because of the notorious four tones, each which has a distinctive pitch contour not unlike a musical note. Using the wrong tone, such as the third "dipping" tone instead of the forth "dropping" tone, completely changes the meaning of a word.

Unfortunately, our Chinese interlocutors usually, unwittingly, add a subconscious psychological barrier on top of our already exasperating language barrier that prevents them from trying to piece together what we foreigners are saying, regardless of our fluency. Having been dismissed so many times over the years with a "ting bu dong," nobody can really fault me for giving up on learning Chinese.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Times.