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Originally Posted by Stensie4JC
I think any term that is used to separate people into groups, especially based on something like race or national origin, can be considered derogatory. It took me a long time in China to get over being called "foreigner." Children (and adults) shout it at you in the street, especially if you go where few white people have gone before. I usually ignore adults, but with children I point back at them and shout, "Chinese!"
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Despite being white as a bloody vampire, I only occasionally have people point me out as a foreigner. I remember when it first happened and I thought I was being amiable when I looked around surprised said "where?!" until I recalled that sarcasm is a bit of a lost cause in Chinese.
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And delphidb96, you can speak Chinese as incorrectly as you like. They won't mind, they just won't know what on earth you are saying. You can butcher English pretty bad and still be understood, but Chinese, with "no grammar" so many homonyms, and those frustrating tones, even a "small" mistake can render you unintelligible.
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It's not so much that it's unintelligible...it's more that Chinese folks won't bother to try piecing it together. I've had to decode some pretty horrid Chinese spoken by foreigners, and mistakes in Chinese are not really any harder to decode than those in English, except in the case of isolated syllables or individual words on occasion. With the exception of some of the better Chinese teachers I've met, most Chinese don't decode language mistakes particularly well. Of course, most native English speakers I know don't always decode Chinglish well either.
I have more than once found myself translating a foreigner's broken Chinese to functional Chinese for Chinese folks who wouldn't even attempt to listen, just passing it off as English or some other language they don't understand. Figuring it out isn't a magical gift, but rather just a willingness to consider what kinds of mistakes are likely. Seems rare enough though to be magic sometimes.