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A new era

Beijing, 16th of August

With the World Cup over and summer on its last legs, its also the end of another personal era for me. I have accepted a job here in Beijing which means my days of being a student are over. Getting a job in China very much depends on who you know, connections (guan xi) are definitely something you need to keep a close eye on here and it just so happens that I had a friend who knew about a job opening.So I have now started a new job at an I.T. headhunting company (lie2 tou2 gong1 si1), basically doing proofreading work. I decided to leave my studies and take the job in the hope that it will provide me with an opportunity to work in a fully Chinese environment and to also apply what I've learnt in the classroom to the real world. Of course the other reason is money, especially as the acting work just wasn't paying the bills.

Privileged to be the only foreigner

All of the staff are Chinese which means I feel quite privileged to be the only foreigner in an office of 40. My first week highlighted the huge gap between studying in a class and surviving in a real language environment. Suddenly I found that I couldn't understand anything anyone said. Much of the language my new colleagues (tong2 shi4) use relates to their work so its pretty specialised and I've had to learn new terms such as CV (jian3 li4) and consultant (gu4 wen4) very quickly. Quite a few of my colleagues speak very good English which can actually be frustrating because if they say something in Chinese which at first I don't understand they will automatically revert to English, and in the future always use English when talking to me about that subject. This isn't helpful for my Chinese, but is done automatically, so I usually have to ask them to specifically speak in Chinese. They probably think I'm mad.

Teaching business English

Much of my work revolves around business English (shang1 wu4 ying1 yu3) as I also provide the staff with training every-week so I also have to get up-to-spec on the IT executive search lingo. Coming from an IT background, this isn't proving to be too hard. Though it is hard learning these terms in Chinese!

Editor's note: Chris is writing Chinese words in 'Pinyin', Latin script, using numbers that indicate the tone of the word. Find out more with our course Real Chinese.

Sent by: Chris

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