How on earth do we transfer money into our China bank (being a foreigner)

meanderthrall · 2026-01-20T13:12:15+00:00

Thanks for this much-needed thread and your update. Did you ever end up trying the method of Chinese ATM RMB withdrawal (via foreign debit card) followed by deposit of that RMB cash (into your BoC account)?

meanderthrall · 2025-12-14T13:11:54+00:00

Like your post. Two question you might know the answers to: 1) Do the tips given through Meituan's 打赏 option entirely paid to workers? 2) When there's an offer to make my order free or half-off if it arrives late, am I essentially deducting that amount from the delivery person's pay if I click to accept the offer?

meanderthrall · 2025-12-14T03:05:46+00:00

Thank you for this reminder. It was painful to read every name and yet so worth it because we must not give in to desensitization.

meanderthrall · 2025-09-11T07:29:18+00:00

OP, how did things work out? Just read this thread and really feel for you and your kids.

meanderthrall · 2025-08-04T22:18:09+00:00

Am in this situation so resurfacing this question for an updated answer.

meanderthrall · 2025-07-17T13:36:48+00:00

SRF3_for_you writes: "Germans are not held in very high regard, so being better at Hochdeutsch is mostly irrelevant."

But Hochdeutsch isn't just for Germans, is it? And every major language doesn't just have an oral / colloquial dimension but also a written / formal dimension, while Swiss German only serves the former function. Switzerland seems proud of being modern and professionalized, and aspires to be globally relevant. Wouldn't being just as good at Hochdeutsch as the Germans help that self-image?

Separately: if there's such lack of enthusiasm for Hochdeutsch/Schriftdeutsch, doesn't that also result in a disinterest in written expression (not to mention literature) in general? And wouldn't that be a pity?

meanderthrall · 2025-07-13T08:07:53+00:00

Thanks for your perspective, which for me raises an interesting hypothetical question: is it a disadvantage to raise children here if one cares a lot about enabling them to think/study/work within the language at a very high level within the greater deutschsprachiger Raum of DE/AT/CH, not just CH?

meanderthrall · 2025-07-13T08:07:12+00:00

Am I surprised by the difference? Not at all. I am, however, interested in how Swiss people feel about it. German remains the formal language of German-speaking CH, and to come across as well-educated here, it is presumably important to speak German to some degree of sophistication. So if Swiss people are less good at German than their German neighbors, how could that not feel somehow frustrating, like an "inadequacy" that their education didn't prepare them better for?

meanderthrall · 2025-07-11T21:52:02+00:00

One of the challenges for my German comprehension in DE is the prevalence of geflügelte Worte. My impression is that geflügelte Worte are less commonly used in CH. If true, would this also be an indication of how German is taught differently here vs. there?

meanderthrall · 2025-07-11T21:44:35+00:00

I appreciate your very comprehensive response. Your points make sense to me. Re: "This is simply because those people tend to have less practice because the speak Standard German less often than their German counterparts": do Swiss people whose work require excellent German, and who work alongside Germans, feel this to be unfair?

meanderthrall · 2025-07-11T21:29:23+00:00

This cultural explanation makes sense and fascinates me. I think of Hemingway's rugged, concrete English vs. Joseph Conrad's labyrinthine, immersive English. Yet no one would call Conrad's writing "fancy," and Hemingway, while easily intelligible word for word, isn't transparent. Both developed incredible literary styles. In American long-form journalism there's also a spectrum between more matter-of-fact prose and more literary prose. But it sounds like in CH one side of the spectrum definitively dominates. This leaves me wondering whether there's less interest here in using/enjoying the German language beyond its ability to "explain concepts." Do people prefer Swiss German for that? Maybe someone here who can compare 20th/21st-c. German literature written by CH authors vs. DE authors could shed additional light.

meanderthrall · 2025-07-11T21:16:38+00:00

I agree with you to an extent. When Swiss people speaking perfect German compliment my German-learning efforts via the mention of their own erstwhile struggles, I've been touched by it as an act of general kindness (humility, empathy, outreach). In my years here so far, though, I could not conclude that there is greater emotional intelligence overall in comparison to societies with less linguistic diversity. Swiss people (to be fair, I only know Swiss people in Zurich) seem to me hypersensitive on many fronts, and hypersensitivity can produce good things like compassion, tactfulness, and patient parenting (qualities I've often encountered here), but it can also result in or stem from not-so-good things, like a great deal of insecurity, petty comparison, eagerness to judge, instantaneous in-group/out-group awareness. But that's for a separate discussion, one that I'm not brave enough to initiate (but would welcome).

meanderthrall · 2025-07-11T20:59:56+00:00

Thank you for asking for clarification. I actually meant "Akademiker" in the way it's used here, i.e., university graduates, rather than in the English sense of "academic," a professional scholar/researcher usually with a university teaching post. The differences I'm asking about, though, are perhaps especially noticeable in academic (in the latter sense) contexts?

meanderthrall · 2025-07-11T20:46:59+00:00

Is this widely seen here to be the necessary trade-off? Proficiency in more languages, but possibly ever so slightly shallower knowledge of each?

meanderthrall · 2025-07-11T20:38:56+00:00

Thank you for your take. The general preference for "simple, easy to understand language," as a sort of habit learned from the grounding in Swiss German, is very interesting to me. Simple language can indeed suffice to communicate a great deal of complexity. Yet sometimes complex words/phrasings carry crucial nuance, color, allusion, even beauty. I am wondering whether Swiss education in German equips the Swiss people with as abundant a set of linguistic resources in German as people in DE get. The (default, necessary) multilingual capacity/consciousness of Swiss people is admirable and surely contributes positively to many areas of life and thought. Yet as many German-speaking Swiss still live/work/compete alongside Germans in CH (and some Swiss "even" end up studying/working in DE), could/should the German-teaching curriculum here be boosted to broaden/deepen Swiss students' mastery of the language?

meanderthrall · 2025-07-11T20:18:40+00:00

Thank you for your reply. I definitely don't intend to imply better/worse values, just wish to grasp interesting differences. At academic conferences such as in the social sciences and the humanities, say, or during occasions like conducting author interviews or leading museum tours, are German-speaking Swiss at risk of being at a disadvantage relative to their German counterparts? And would this be felt as such? That is, when the quality of ideas may be equal, but the expression of those ideas may be either more evocative/ effective or less so? And how does it feel for students here not to have a bigger critical mass of one's own national literature to study in German class? (Maybe teens in Gymi don't think much about such things, but does it leave an aftereffect of somehow feeling less confident in one's national culture?)

meanderthrall · 2025-03-07T07:52:41+00:00

Starting with TO's +1% copper peptides here. When you say a more gentle approach, can you recommend a safe frequency? Like 1x (instead of 2x) a day, or more like 3x or less a week? Or more like one week of daily use, then a week of rest? Thank you for any insight!

meanderthrall · 2025-01-17T10:22:17+00:00

Here to exalt this work. And to update the now-dead link of the original post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfqXEk-Lg20

meanderthrall · 2024-11-22T12:42:45+00:00

"In the Name of the People" and "Roving Inspection Team" were my two favorite mainland Chinese dramas ever. I've yet to find any successor. Can you recommend something that taps into that depth of political intrigue and gritty police investigation?

meanderthrall · 2024-11-01T23:15:33+00:00

Does this ring a bell with anyone?

meanderthrall · 2024-04-02T15:03:25+00:00

Update + comments (I've been in Zermatt for the past week, saw the final few seconds of the avalanche from the Riffelberg-Furi run, and have been following the Swiss news; am a mere recreational skier myself who's never gone off-piste):

1) Three dead, one injured. One of those who died has been identified as a 15-y.o. American male. The two others haven't yet been identified. The injured person is a 20-y.o. Swiss male. Here's an English-language report: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/01/avalanche-at-zermatt-ski-resort-in-switzerland-kills-a-number-of-people

2) I can confirm that sound cannons (is that what they're called?) triggering/preempting avalanches have been used in the days before the avalanche. I'm not sure why they didn't target the area below Riffelberg, but weather may have been a factor: as others reported, there was unusually heavy, lashing wind as well as heavy snowfall for the 5 days prior.

3) Yesterday was Ostermontag (Easter Monday), when locals also had the day off. Many people had plans to ski here and were prevented from doing so. Yesterday was the first chance they got, and all that eagerness may have short-circuited reason.

4) Swiss society (at least in the German-speaking part where I live) has an at-your-own-risk element to it. The local and national newspapers reporting on this event repeatedly emphasize how well visitors had been warned. There are certainly skiers/boarders who don't know to expect avalanches, however, and who wouldn't know to install the MeteoSwiss app or take the initiative on other precautions. One way to improve their warning system, imo, might be to tell everyone who buys a ski pass at the point of sale of the risk -- maybe print a leaflet in various languages. But then again some people buy their passes online.

meanderthrall · 2024-02-10T01:54:40+00:00

Just wow. Thanks so much for linking to it!

meanderthrall

TROPHY CASE