South Africans in Beijing

I have not heard of any problems for South African passport holders.

Re English skills a big difference between Cape Town accent to Pretoria accent!

Hi

I am truly sorry that you only came across this sort of shit now......I am also native English speaker, but the chinese find it hard to understand our freaking Afrikaans accent....Afrikaans? Yes we have been influenced linguistically by the burgers.....Why?......anyway I am an English teacher and literally changed my accent to suit my students, i.e. changed to an american accent.....so I pretend....silly? I know....and I hate myself......just to get the kids to understand, once they understood I went back to my Afrikaans accent, but I also just signed a new 2 year contract and plan on staying for the next 10 years.

Just speak slowly and pretend you're casting for "Friends"....I like the San Francisco accent...suits me!

I am a Brit and also have trouble understanding a strong Afrikaaner accent.

The problem is that we are native english speakers who struggled with Afrikaans at school. Even the brit accent, like some of the scots need some sort of intervention for the kids to understand.

true

South African accents vary dramatically! However, South African English accents are just as clear as British accents - I guess in some cases schools prefer American accents. I have heard some difficult to decipher Canadian accents before so I'm not sure - really depends on the individual. That said, I'm from SA and didn't have any visa issues.

I'm not a South African and in my experience there is a huge difference in S. African accents.

Cape Town being easy to understand and very similar to other English speaking countries whilst English spoken by someone from Pretoria with a strong Afrikaans accent is hard to understand.