Cainntear wrote:Gaoling97 wrote:Seriously, I have noticed that, presumably because almost no westerners are actually at a very high level in Chinese, people seriously overestimate how good some people actually are/there is nobody to call people out when they exaggerate their abilities. And native Chinese speakers tend to be overly generous with foreigners speaking Chinese to a seriously comical extent.
Not just Chinese. There's a tendency across languages to complement the foreigner who speaks the language badly.
I used to find it insulting at my local Spanish exchange that people would have a deep conversation without commenting on my Spanish and would then exchange two sentences with someone who was pretty much a beginner and then shower them with praise for how well they spoke Spanish. All I had to do was cambiar el chip and start recognising that my Spanish was good enough that it wouldn't even occur to them to comment on it.
I now trrat natives compliments of learners with a rather large pinch of salt...!
It's why I quite liked one of Xiaomanyc's videos where he spoke Vietnamese. Many of his videos are full of "oh wow your [x language] is so good". And I think for some of the languages, it's just people not expecting somebody to speak their language, and are being nice and encouraging. I guess overall they don't want to discourage people who feel like they're still learning.
In a Vietnamese one a woman stopped to correct him. And his Vietnamese was basic IMO. Some of the comments called the woman rude, but 1) she probably pegged him for a learner and 2) I think most language learners don't mind being corrected and taught the right way because we can learn from it and improve our language.
Maybe when a native doesn't say you're good and talk to you like a regular person, maybe that's when they're truly complementing your language. If they complement you, it means you still have more work to do.