My Chinese is better than yours, and yours, and yours

I had a bit of an epiphany the other day to do with language competency.  I had been of the opinion that most of my Chinese colleagues' English is better than my Chinese, because their English vocabularies are larger than my Chinese vocabulary.  (This is because they learned thousands of English words by rote in middle school, high school, and college.)  But I went to lunch with a colleague of mine who is very reluctant to speak English unless he has to, and I realized that vocabulary size is not the primary determiner of language competency.  Instead, competency is a combination of vocabulary, grammar, accent, and perhaps most importantly, ability to communicate in real life.  And "ability to communicate", in turn, means a determination to speak, an ability to say things even if you don't know the "right" words, and a willingness to say "I don't understand what you just said".

By these criteria, my Chinese is actually better than many of my colleagues' English.  Sure, their foreign language vocabulary is larger than mine, but they do things like not understand what I say to them (in English), not admit it, and then reply in a way that reveals that they didn't understand.  This is an example of poor communication ability.  Other colleagues never speak to me in English because they know I speak Chinese.  I'm not complaining, because this is great for my Chinese.  But it indicates, on some level, a lack of determination to speak English.  I, on the other hand, am quite determined to speak Chinese.  The point is that even though their knowledge of English may be better than my knowledge of Chinese, their use of English is not as good as my use of Chinese.

From the point of view of actually communicating, it actually doesn't matter who speaks what language better than someone else, as long as everyone speaks the language being spoken well enough.  But the realization that my Chinese is better than many of my colleagues' English is a big confidence booster, and makes me even more determined to keep speaking it.