Howdy Howdy Howdy
American here, planning on visiting China for the first time at the end of the year.
Specifically wondering if anyone here has any advice on the visa process for American citizens -- I've been researching myself but I keep finding either conflicting or outdated information since things seem to change rapidly.
From what I gathered, one needs to make an appointment window to the closest Chinese Consulate and apply for a travel visa in person-- which is then good for repeat visits up to 10 years? Or are there single use visas as well?
Also I'll be happy for any advice about visiting in general-- it's a huge country and a lot of ideas to sift through. Was suggested for phone (android) VPN, sim card, WeChat, WayGo, Baidu, 12306, Didi, MetroMan, and Trip.com (missing any?)
Mighty obliged folks, yeehaw
If you aren't fairly fluent in speaking Chinese then don't bother with attempting to learn phrases.
I say this without trying to throw shade on anyone but Chinese is a tonal language and, although English is a crypto-tonal language, we lack a conceptual framework for understanding tonal languages and it requires a fair bit of time devoted to learning tones before you can expect to be able to have decent pronunciation, and thus to say the correct words. (Long story but in Chinese the same syllable can mean 5 different words depending on the tone, then adding extra syllables, with their own respective tones, can make different words yet again.)
Unless you have already learned a tonal language to a reasonable degree of fluency then picking up spoken Chinese has a pretty significant learning curve for a native English speaker.
Learn how to say hello, goodbye, and thanks - that always goes a long way. But if you're hoping to engage in basic conversation, you're almost certainly going to need to physically point at the Chinese words themselves or to use Google translate.
Hm. I still think this relies upon a degree of familiarity with Chinese though.
If you don't know Pinyin then your phrase could be pronounced by an English speaker like "Wee-sheng-gee-anne zay nail-lee" and tbh that's going to to be pretty baffling.
But my point wasn't that you're not going to be able to communicate anything in Chinese but not to expect that grabbing a phrasebook would be sufficient to engage in basic conversation just from reading the Pinyin. If it were Spanish or Italian (or German, although you would have to go hunting if you want to find a German who doesn't know conversational English) you'd be able to use a phrasebook and scrape by with just that and nothing else because there's a lot of mutual intelligibility that exists.
But Pinyin is a different case because native English speakers instinctively do really weird things when they read words, particularly when it comes to vowels and emphasis, because our orthography is a fucking unmitigated disaster and it just doesn't play well with other languages, especially with the Romanisation of other languages which don't use the Latin script. I think that this is most obvious when you see an English speaker tries to write something purely phonetically without using the IPA. It's so damn hard to imply emphasis and even to clearly indicate the basic pronunciation of sounds, like with that "gee" I wrote above where you have to wonder if I intended it to be pronounced like "Gee whiz!" or like "Ghee".
This probably says more about the cultural insularity of where I live but one time I legitimately caught someone who read the name "Mao" and pronounced it as "Mayo" once. Crackers gonna have terminal mayo-brain and all of that, sure, but it says a lot about how native English speakers process language; if the same letters can be said as Máo or as Méiyǒu then you know you're in for a bad time.
If you're a complete beginner when it comes to Chinese then aside from learning the basics pleasantries I would probably just stick to memorising a few key words like toilet and food or restaurant because you're going to get by better if you just use them rather than trying to say a whole sentence poorly with a thick American accent.
Of course everyone starts somewhere and I'd encourage everyone to learn as much of foreign languages as they can, except for French, but I just wouldn't count on a traveller's phrasebook for communicating in Chinese the way that you would be able to if you decided to take a trip down to Mexico.