My boss just asked me (in a very pointed way trying to clearly get me to agree with his weirdo reactionary politics) why so many Chinese people are learning Chinese at our college, And when I told him ‘well you know there’s multiple dialects of Chinese’ he was like “yes but it’s different than if, say, you or I were learning Chinese”....how?

for the record my boss is not white (middle eastern, not sure what ethnicity but he speaks fluent Arabic) and he also knows that I am multilingual, so idk why he decided to say that
I pressed him and said “well why do native English speakers take English classes? Maybe they just wanna be professional writers and refine their existing skills? neither of us speak any Chinese so i don’t think we’re in any position to pass judgement” and he sort of conceded & clammed up
weird & uncomfortable.

@photophoregirl
Sounds like he just hadn't thought of taking the class like we would an English class. He had probably categorized it as a Foreign Language class and was confused why someone would take a foreign language class of their own language.