When I first arrived in Hong Kong, I asked some colleagues about learning Cantonese. They told me that people in Hong Kong tend to be very hard-working, and yo

When I first arrived in Hong Kong, I asked some colleagues about learning Cantonese. They told me that people in Hong Kong tend to be very hard-working, and you have one or two sentences to convince them that speaking with you in Cantonese is just as efficient use of their time as speaking to you in English. I have a friend who was born here, looks local, but spent her formative years in Canada. She has been back in Hong Kong for more than 15 years now, but still isn't happy with her Cantonese conversational skills because she speaks with a bit of a Canadian accent and people usually force her to speak English after hearing her speak a couple sentences of Cantonese. It's fair enough; my friend isn't paying these people to be speaking partners, and is trying to extract a bit of a knowledge tax from them. On the other hand, when I run into people whose English isn't particularly good, they are very willing to stumble through a very rough mixture of Mandarin and Cantonese with me when it's the most efficient way for us to communicate. In these cases, it's not uncommon for people to continue to speak Mandarin at my wife, after I've told them in Mandarin "She's Thai overseas Chinese; she can only speak Thai and English". My wife has learned to break eye contact to discourage them from continuing to talk at her, and to avoid giving the impression she secretly understands Mandarin. I don't think the people even realize they're speaking at my wife and getting responses from me; some people just seem to find it more awkward to speak Mandarin with a white person than to speak Mandarin at a Chinese-looking person who's clearly not paying attention.