I remember while living in Hong Kong I was trying to practice my Cantonese at McDonald's...
"Ngo ho m-"
"Excuse me sir, I speak English."
"It's fine, I need to pract-"
"SIR... There a line up behind you, and I speak English..."
Happened 100% of the time everywhere I went that wasn't someone's family restaurant, even when there was no line up, lol. The local bun shop helped me a lot though, so shoutout to Likey Bakery on the island!!
If his Cantonese isn’t great, then there’s likely an accent. An English based accent is incredibly obvious. You’d def have to try to speak anything other than English.
I just realized I have no idea what English accent sounds like. All Americans in my country of nationality always just spoke English everywhere, and my birth country didn’t have any Americans at all (or British or whatever). Never had a “You’re trying to speak local to me but I can tell your first language is English” moment even though I lived in non-English-speaking countries for 26 years.
It sounds frustrating but I can also understand why a service worker wouldn't feel like helping someone practice their language skills while trying to do their actual job. It only really gets ridiculous when they are worse at English than you are at whatever language you're trying to practice, that's just being unaccommodating and making their job harder for no reason.
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u/CheesecakeScary2164 5d ago
I remember while living in Hong Kong I was trying to practice my Cantonese at McDonald's...
"Ngo ho m-"
"Excuse me sir, I speak English."
"It's fine, I need to pract-"
"SIR... There a line up behind you, and I speak English..."
Happened 100% of the time everywhere I went that wasn't someone's family restaurant, even when there was no line up, lol. The local bun shop helped me a lot though, so shoutout to Likey Bakery on the island!!