Here I just want to share a funny short story with you. It’s my personal experience. Today I went to shopping at Dominick’s with my friend. After we finished shopping and checked out, we were walking towards to the door with a lot of shopping bags in our hands. Then a staff resting near the door suddenly spoke to us in a little vague Chinese ”Zhu ni you hao de yi tian", which in English is “Have a good day”. My friend and I felt pleased and said “Thanks” to this guy. But when we walked out of the store, we couldn’t help laughing because even though we were really admired this guy’s enthusiasm of learning Chinese (before he could only say “hello”, “thank you” and “goodbye” in Chinese), I had to say we Chinese never say “Have a good day” to greet people and therefore it sounded very wired. Consequently, if this nice guy would remain be interested in speaking daily Chinese conversations, I recommend him to make contact with Chinese by asking them “Have you eaten yet?”, which is a most used routine salutation, but not an invitation to dinner in China when people come across with each other in almost every situation. However, with the economic development and richness of goods and material, Chinese are less concerned about foods than previous hard years. At present, the popular greeting has changed to “Are you busy?”. This change indicates that peoples’ priority has shifts to working and living. This impressing episode gave a lesson that in some cases despite we could speak smooth language of other countries, it is still a long way to really understand their interior culture and custom behind their languages.
