Anyone around here who'll be in Beijing during the last days of March and early April?

Hi I'm here at Shanghai and it is indeed a lovely place. actually, I decided to hire a photographer to document my adventures. They're awesome and I love all the photographs. Incase you also need them, feel free to ping me and I'll help you reached them. Anyway, I so love this place and the people as well. wonderful experience indeed.

What sort of "skills" do foreigners think they have that opportunities are so plentiful? Where are all these overqualified foreigners to begin with?

Reality is that even 15 years ago in most professions there was a glut of Chinese candidates working for peanuts and they work longer hours for a lot less pay.

Most jobs worth taking used to be white-face back then just as they are today. The only difference is that there's so many foreigners today that even white-face jobs are not as easy to get and with economy boom, the comparative pay is not what it used to be either. Just as back then, most foreigners only have one marketable asset - English/Western culture.

Quite a few of my friends did quite well for themselves in China. Without exception, they are all Chinese who came to US 15 years ago to get degrees or Chinese Americans who decided to go to China after graduating.

This is mostly common sense, but no matter where one goes if one doesn't know the language (speaking and writing at a very high level), one better have very specific industry skill to get a job and be a superstar if you expect to get paid more than the measly local salaries for same type of work. Most foreigners don't have this, so their primary job avenues are in English language/Western interface roles... And the Western interface roles are increasingly being taken by Chinese who came back after getting US/EU education.

As for Colombia, I'm skeptical. I'm bullish on the country because it is getting safer by the day and opportunities are developing. But there simply isn't as much money and investment in Colombia and there probably never will be. They are not competitive in manufacturing or anything else (?) so where is their edge and source of growth? They're going to grow as country stabilizes but it will not be rags to riches story by any means.

India is the next China and it's not even close. The issue here is that expat lifestyle is not much of a draw.

Replying to a 1 year old post now? 2p2 is sure getting slow...

10-15 years ago nobody came to China for a job but highly paid expats. People were either getting stuff manufactured / exporting stuff to their home countries or starting other businesses with English training centers being major money makers for some people for example.

English teaching paid peanuts back then and still does now when adjusted for inflated costs of living.

Now China pays foreign pilots a lot for example as there aren't enough domestic ones.

It sounds like you had a line of coke or some meth last night and felt like making a "deep" reply to some random post from a year ago.

India is a 3rd world ****hole. The people you see coming to the US are the cream of the crop and in no way reflective of the masses in India. The average Chinese isn't that smart either but not a full blown India tier street ****ting ******. Add the 3rd world bureaucratic red tape to encourage bribery and it's a clear no go.

Has anyone else had trouble withdrawing money from pokerstars? I have ICBC card (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China)

hey dude,
i can transfer you money on alipay/wechat/banktransfer if you want.

Hey there,

can anyone give me some information regarding opening a personal bank acc in Macau? How difficult is it with all the KYC rules getting tougher and tougher...

I currently live in BKK, but travel to Singapore a lot for work. Im also quite often in my freetime in Macau to play some poker.
I have Bank accounts in both countries and would like to open now a personal bank account in Macau.
I just think its more convenient than withdrawing lots of cash from my DSB credit card or bring wads of cash with me every time I fly in.

Does anyone have experience with Macanese banks and can enlighten me perhaps?

What kind of passport do you have? I know theres HSBC Macau, also theres a Macau thread

All the major HK banks are also in Macau. How easy it is to open an account in Macau, I don't know, all I can say is in HK it is a lot of hassle, you have to provide verification for everything and anything even if you live there. Since it is mostly the same banks and the same kind of territory one would assume it is similar in Macau but I don't know.
I mean, money talks, if you have a lot of doh to deposit, you might be more welcome, but we're not talking about a few buyins here, lots of rich people around in these parts.

German

I just wonder if I can open an HSCB account easily there if I already have an HSBC Premier account somewhere else?

Yes if you have proper identification I don't see why it would be a problem.

I have a good friend who is a Macau local and would be glad to connect you thru WeChat if you want, just send me a pm

Because in many places it's troublesome to impossible to open a bank account if you are neither a national nor a resident. Main reason being legislation meant to prevent money laundering and tax evasion that keeps on getting tougher.

How does cashing out from we chat pay work?
Is it preferred there over cash?

Is it hard to find a short deck nlh cash game?

Just curious for those of you fluent in Mandarin, what was your approach to the learning the language, especially in the beginning. How much emphasis did you put into learning the characters vs just learning how to speak. Any programs or apps to recommend?

So far I'm using youtube tutorials and duolingo. When using duolingo I feel like I know a decent amount of words and characters by now, and I'm pretty good at figuring out what the sentences mean, and arranging the characters in into words/sentences when in the app (it helps that its basically multiple choice). But then when I get into an actual conversation I'm usually still helpless and ting bu donging pretty hard. When trying to speak it's like I have this collection of words in my head and I just can't put them together in the right way yet (at least without thinking about it forever!) Any advice for the improving the listening/speaking?

Also in the digital age, do you think it's even worthwhile learning how to write Chinese characters? I mean I plan on just being able to type on my computer or phone for almost everything, so it seems a bit unnecessary to me. So far the one downfall I've noticed is I get tripped up on the stylized/calligraphied characters when they look different from the ones that show up on the computer typeface.

Learning to write is worthless. Between talking to people on wechat and pleco you'll get all the character work you need imo.

Just try to talk to people in Chinese and if you think you can't say something correctly just go for it; you'll be surprised how forgiving Chinese grammar is.

Ok thanks. When I googled it I seemed to get lots of people saying it's worth it to write down the characters for memorization purposes and learn the stroke order too. And the stuff about how the characters are just sooo beautiful, so you should learn to write for that reason alone...

Dont learn how to write. You can write on pc, smartphone by the use of pinyin. It helps to better recognize the characters, but in my experience also goes naturally by just studying words.

For basic there is a lot of good stuff on YouTube. I used memrise to learn words for the HSK, but the best tool by far to use is Chinesepod. They have short podcasts in every level that are very helpful both with listening as well as vocab and grammer. I still use it whenever i have a moment of time to keep my mandarin up.

Chinesepod is great

Cool, I'll look up Chinesepod, tx. Harry, just curious, what did you take the HSK for?

I feel like learning how to write characters was very helpful in the process of improving my vocabulary and reading. Probably not a necessity, but I also had to do it for my HSK.

By the way cardshark, why are you learning Mandarin? Did Snooki became a big Chinatown?

LB, why were you taking the HSK?

Snooky is Chinatown now! Playing against Chinese players day in and day out has really ramped up my motivation to to learn Mandarin again; not for purely altruistic reasons though, but I have always found the language interesting. I've got a decent base from when I taught English for a semester in Guizhou and then traveled around SW China for a few months after that.

My undergraduate classes were taught in mandarin, they required me to have an hsk 5

I took HSK V, which is basically the gateway between an elementary and an intermediate in mandarin as far as tests go. It's a necessity to have if you ever want to work in a Chinese company/study at a Chinese university. I did it mostly for my cv, and it was a nice goal to work hard for.

Harry, LB:

How much time/effort/years did it take you get to HSK 5 level and what was your fluency level like at that point? Also how'd you guys get into learning Chinese in the first place?