Yes, you’re right, “foreign looking” should be the word, actually. I have had numerous students and friends with Chinese ancestry and they are treated completely differently than those who look foreign. The default attitude is that they should speak Chinese well and if they don’t, something is wrong. I’ve been in the same class as several of these students and experiences how people treat our proficiency levels completely differently even though they were in fact quite similar.

On this topic, I think the term foreigner is more relevant. The more you look like a foreigner (different from Chinese people), the more the praise of your dodgy Chinese is going to be overstating how good you are.

A Chinese looking person wearing a t-shirt that says “Non-Native Speaker” will nonetheless be expected to have good Chinese and will not be praised in China for getting a few tones right.

So using NS/NNS isn’t really identifying the groups that will actually encounter this problem. Foreigner is better, depending on what you mean by foreigner (if you mean what the Chinese mean by the word, it’s pretty accurate). Actually, non-Chinese looking person would be best, we don’t have a convenient word for that. NCLP?

It’s obvious that this commenter isn’t very good at distinguishing language learning blogs from academic literature! 🙂 Joking aside, though, I don’t really understand what you mean. For most people reading this blog, foreigner means adult person who may or may not have learnt Chinese at home and then travels to China for one reason or another. That’s quite enough for the purposes of this article. I’m perfectly aware of the difficulties of defining different kinds of speakers, but I fail to see what a discussion about this would add to this article.

I have no clue why Chinese people like to compliment foreigners on their pronunciation, but it’s a fact that they do quite a lot and, in my opinion, that creates a false sense of achievement that will impede progress if interpreted as a reliable assessment of the learner’s proficiency.

Also, I don’t know why anyone other than one’s Chinese teacher should be complimenting somebody’s Chinese skills. If it’s just a member of the public or some random person, it’s simply not warranted. One of the most stupid comments I’ve heard (given in English, of course) is “Good pronunciation!” How could I have avoided receiving totally off-topic comments about my Chinese language ability? Used bad pronunciation?

On the other hand, when you’re Chinese becomes indisdinnguishable from a native speaker’s, focus is moved from how you say something to what you say, which opens access to so many other interesting things. In my case, I value this more highly than the process of learning pronunciation itself, although both are interesting.

With any skill like language that has no defined “finish line”, you never stop learning. 活到老学到老

The better you get, the more you realise how much more there is to learn. And you’re continually redefining your goals. At the start of an enterprise like this, there’s no way you can even conceive the goals you have later on.

To give a somewhat artificial example, perhaps you’re unaware that 成语 exist when you start out. How could you resolve to learn and use them frequently? Once they’re part of your awareness, you can start to conceptualise how to improve in that area.

The better my Chinese (or Taiji or teaching) gets, the more humility I feel about my ability.

And that’s really useful as an impetus for improvement.