Can you live in China without knowing Mandarin?

So yes, it is very possible to enjoy your working experience in China without speaking Mandarin. It would be actually harder for a foreigner with perfect Chinese but poor English to find a job. However, expats who are able to speak Chinese are living a totally different experience.

Can you get around China without knowing Chinese?

In short, you can rest assured that a trip to China does not require you to speak Chinese. It is possible to get around China sometimes using only English and most certainly using voice translation apps on your phone or Mandarin phrasebooks.

Do most people in China know Mandarin?

Of the 70\% of the population who can speak Mandarin, many do not do it well enough, a ministry spokeswoman told Xinhua news agency on Thursday. Mandarin – formally called Putonghua in China, meaning “common tongue” – is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world.

How do you speak Mandarin?

Starts here14:54Learn Mandarin: The best basic Mandarin toolkit – YouTubeYouTube

Can I visit Hong Kong without knowing Chinese?

You don’t need Cantonese or Mandarin to live and work in Hong Kong in most cases. However, if you want to know the place you call home and interact with the people that share it with you, then you should learn Cantonese, at the very least. Perhaps focus on Mandarin if you go to the Mainland for business.

Can a Mandarin speaker understand Cantonese?

However, the two languages are distinct when spoken. Mandarin speakers typically cannot understand Cantonese speakers, and vice versa.

Does China know English?

Despite English being taught in the Chinese school system for many years, few Chinese could be considered fluent in English. There are hundreds of millions of people in China studying English, but less than 1\% of Mainland Chinese are conversational, according to some estimates.

Is it possible to work in China without learning Mandarin?

Many expats work in China without learning Mandarin. This is more feasible in the big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, but even in those places you’re likely to run into difficulty if you only speak English.

Will Mandarin overtake English as the official language of China?

As China’s economic power grows, Mr Lee believes that Mandarin will overtake English. In fact, he has already been seeing hints of this. “The decline of the English language probably follows the decline of the US dollar. “If the renminbi is becoming the next reserve currency then you have to learn Chinese.”

Why is Mandarin becoming so popular in China?

Today Mandarin is increasingly being used because children whose parents are from the mainland China often grow up speaking the language, especially those closer to border districts.

Why doesn’t Vietnam want to learn Mandarin?

It is a sound economic argument, but in Vietnam’s case, there is resistance to learning Mandarin. The country may share a border with China, but the Vietnamese government’s choice to not emphasise Mandarin is an emotional one, says leading economist Le Dang Doanh.