One day last week I was walking through town and saw a couple walking nearby – a Chinese woman with a Western man. I wondered what language they were speaking to each other, so I eavesdropped and heard that it was Mandarin. This surprised me as it’s rare, in my experience, to hear non-Chinese people speaking Mandarin, especially round here. I was considering going over to introduce myself and finding out how the guy had learned Mandarin, but by that time they’d gone off in different direction.
If you speak a lesser-studied language and hear someone speaking it in public, would you go and talk to them?
