Originally Posted by
OskiBear
I'm Chinese American and it's interesting - here in the US, in Asian neighborhoods, most merchants seem to assume I speak Chinese (at restaurants, grocery store, etc.). However, when I'm overseas in Chinese-speaking countries, they very rarely open with Chinese.
It has nothing to do with the way you speak, but rather with the way you act. I was born in Europe and grew up in San Francisco (went to a high-school that had 60%+ of the student body 1st/2nd/3rd generation Asian), I can easily tell apart Chinese-born Chinese and American/Canadian-born Chinese (or those that spent most of their time in the US/Canada). It's not limited to Americans. National stereotypes exist because they're partly true.
As someone who's fully fluent in 5 languages (bilingual natively, learned English when I was 10, European Portuguese when I was around 25 to the point where I have a very slight accent, but it's not obvious where it's from and a number of people think I'm a local and Spanish shortly thereafter) and less fluent in other related languages I've had waaay too many of these stories that the OP described.
What gets me though is people trying to pay me a compliment me on "how good your [fill in the language] is." They're not realizing it but it's a backhanded compliment.
This example takes the cake:
Six months after arriving in Lisbon, I go to IKEA. By this point, my Portuguese is shaky at best. My face easily passes for a local.
An older lady near the entrance asks me where the entrance is with her cockney British accent. I tell her that it's down the stairs and to the left.
"Oh, you speak such good English!" was her reply.
The only thing I could think of responding to that was "Oh, but you also speak such good English! Where did you learn to speak it?"
