Communicating in a foreign language (Taiwan)

When I first went to Taiwan, I discovered that they had a whole range of accents we didn’t have in Singapore, so I spent a lot of my verbal interactions with the locals asking them to repeat things.  That was tiresome for both me and the other party, so I gave up on that after a while and came up with what I thought was a clever solution:  just nod and smile as the other party rattled on, saying every now and then, “是吗 (shì ma / Is that so)?”  This way, I wouldn’t need to keep interrupting the conversation, and it was good practice at learning to join the dots rather than needing to understand every single word, which is not always possible in real life anyway, even if one was at an advanced level in the language.  It worked very well, until one day I got a puzzled look from the speaker.  It turned out the speaker had just asked me a question, and I was still going, “是吗 (shì ma / Is that so)?”


(Taiwan 1974)