When international students live abroad, they often encounter a lot of communication problems, sometimes they can’t understand what others say, and sometimes they can’t understand what they say. This article summarises some of the problems that international students encounter in their daily lives.
For example, if you don’t pay attention to the pronunciation of “can” and “can’t”, it’s easy to confuse them. In fact, “can” is pronounced gently, while “can’t” is pronounced with a strong stress, which makes it easy to distinguish between them.
There is another commonly used colloquial expression, which is “get + past tense of verb”, such as “get paid/get sth done/get the problem fixed”, these are very common expressions.
Another interesting phenomenon is that in foreigners’ speech, the phrase “I can’t make it” is used more often than “I can’t come/join”.
Also, when asking for help, instead of using “can you do me a favour?” as taught in English textbooks, you should use “I have a favour to ask” or “could you give me a hand? could you give me a hand?”.
Another thing to note is that the phrase “What are you up to?” doesn’t really mean “It’s up to you” in Chinese, but more like “What are you doing? It is more like what we mean when we ask others “What are you doing? Therefore, it is important to understand the difference between them.
When we ask someone how they’re doing, we can use the phrase “How have you been up to?”, which is more formal and more general.
