1) Everytime they say sometime I always act as though I can’t understand and make them repeat it twice.

2) I respond exactly as a I would to another native speaker, without any attempt to simplify my grammar, vocabulary, or reduce speed.

As a result any English conversations are incredibly painful, and anyone who doesn’t end up switching to Mandarin ends up not talking to me altogether .

Sure, it’s not very nice, but it gets the job done. And I don’t have much sympathy for the hordes of people coming up and saying, “Hi, can we be friends? What’s your QQ? Can we set up a time to practice oral English and maybe you can write my English papers for me thanks?”

What disappointed me the most was that even though many of them solicited suggestions on how to improve their English or wanted me to correct them, only a select few seemed to care about what I pointed out. Most of them kept on repeating the same mistakes even after I had pointed them out countless times. The whole experience of speaking English with them made me feel used and otherized, like I was some goddamn mannequin there for them to regurgitate sample sentences.

Now, when anyone tries to speak English to me I pretend not to understand, which in turn makes them insecure (face loss) and more likely to speak Chinese. I also do all correspondence (emails, text messages etc.) exclusively in Chinese.

Over the years I’ve gotten close to a native-sounding Mandarin in a lot of situations, and I’ve found that as my pronunciation got smoother there were only a few diehards left that insisted on speaking English to me. I also pay close attention to any feedback I get and take any suggestions people offer very seriously. I dare suggest I’ve worked much harder to attain my current level in Mandarin than any of them have with their English, and thus fail to see any moral imperative to help them improve their English, seeing its not my native language and the conversation goes much smoother when one of the parties are speaking the language they grew up with.