[petodo]

> Going to China for that long and not trying to learn Mandarin is a misstep.

I went to China with intention to stay there one year to save some money and continue travelling. Then after less than a year I met my future wife.

> Where I lived, Shanghai, there was a western community that essentially interacted with each other in their enclaves and never developed any meaningful relationships outside maybe dating someone who was Chinese. In Shanghai at least you can get along just fine without learning the language, but you will miss out on so much because most people around you can't hold conversations in English.

I lived in Beijing and avoided foreigners outside work enviroment (well we had drinking lunch breaks and ocassionally drank even during dinner after work), didn't frequent bars/clubs for foreigners and first few years even avoided western food. In my first three apartments I had Chinese flatmates (no foreigners, always only me) and we had no problem to communicate in English. The problem in general are different hobbies and culture, not really the language, most of the westerners will have more to talk with other westerner even in broken English than with Chinese who is perfectly fluent in English, it's just fact and speaking Chinese won't change a thing about it.

[meowfly]

I share a bit of that experience when trying to make Chinese friends. The first place I lived was with a family who had a son around my age. He was solely interested in practicing English but he had virtually no life outside of school.

I moved into a foreign students dorm and most of my classmates were Korean and Japanese, but I spoke to them in Chinese. The friend I hung out with the most was Korean and I didn't feel like there was a gap in hobbies. We had a group that would go out and play pool, drink soju, and sing KTV. I never had good opportunities to meet and hangout with other Chinese students. When people go to bars, they really don't go and socialize with others. Socializing is usually contained to the group you are in.

I think I'd say though there is still a big advantage in just being able to converse with taxi drivers, retail workers, etc. People are pretty chatty because westerners speaking Chinese is kind of novel. It is a great way to better understand what I consider a fairly misunderstood country.

[petodo]

I don't think understanding the country and not speaking the language are mutually exclusive. I've met my fair share of foreign students who studied Chinese at home, then stayed in China for a year to not overstay their honeymoon period and yet their understanding of China was completely shallow and they were clueless about China as much as they were when they came, because all their life was dorm parties and clubbing or shagging CN girls and enjoying their student bubble, while speaking local language. Meanwhile I worked for multiple companies over years, talked with plenty of Chinese coworkers whether they were interns or fulltime, dealt with apartment hunt seeing at least hundred of apartments in person, tons of various paperwork with various offices, dealth with hospitals because of wife's pregnancy and visited places that hardly seen any foreigners. You can still understand China even without speaking the language and not understand it while speaking the language.

But I agree western MSM is heavily biased against China and their "journalists" living in their foreign bubble are joke, especially if it's older unmarried men, where you can clearly see what they are doing with their spare time.