Chinese sounds incredibly blunt and rude to Western and Japanese ears.

If you work with Chinese people or are learning Chinese, it is really important to understand this:

In Chinese, formality is impolite.

What do I mean?

A thread

In terms of linguistic politeness, Japanese is on an extreme end--there are numerous ways of saying please and thank you.

English speakers also use please and thank you very frequently.

For Chinese speakers, the politeness has an opposite effect on their ears.

In Chinese, you don't speak in formal tones with friends/relatives/etc. You don't say please and thank you to your parents. It is automatically assumed.

By creating formality, you're actually putting distance between you and who you're speaking to;...

making it clear that they are not close to you, that the relationship is transactional and temporary.

Please and thank you are said in Chinese, but in ways that Japanese and Westerners would describe as very sparingly.

My first time working with a Chinese person where I interacted with them in English, I thought he was rude and abrupt. I made the same mistake because culturally, I am American.

Then I started speaking to him in Chinese and realized that he was a really nice guy. He simply spoke

English the way he spoke Chinese and it did not translated culturally.

As you can imagine, this different interpretation of politeness has caused much miscommunication. I often have to be a cultural interpreter for non-Chinese friends who are working with Chinese teams.

This also creates a problem when it comes to journalism.

I recall during the height of COVID in China, the government was sending out drones to tell people to stay at home.

The English translation of what the drones were saying came across as very strong and scary.

However, when I heard the actual message in Chinese that the drones were emitting, it actually came across as friendly, caring, and empathetic. A sentence-by-sentence translation into English did not capture those dimensions.

(Btw, doesn't mean I think it's OK for drones to be

policing people, but just insight into interpretations vs reality.)

I still struggle with having to switch my cultural brain when speaking with family or if I visit China.

On a previous visit, I got laughed at for saying thank you so often to my mom. How strange, they said.

That's not how you should treat your mother.

Hope this was enlightening!

In summary, if you don't hear please and thank you from Chinese people, it's because they want to signal that you are in their inner circle.

This thread is getting far more attention than I thought so I want to say:
#WearAMask
#VoteHimOut
#EndSARS
#BLM
#UyghurLivesMatter

We are all humans. Let’s all get along and share food with each other.