The teacher laughingly criticizes that: “Of course all the food is 好吃.” We laugh with her and don’t mention the fact that out of the twenty-odd students in the class, probably none of us will actually speak Mandarin in a restaurant to someone who works there. Someone who actually knows how to speak Mandarin — or worse, in my opinion, anyway, someone who doesn’t.

What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
Trilingual
What about someone who speaks two languages?
Bilingual
Someone who speaks one language?
Monolingual?
American.

I came up with the name “chigaijin” a bit less than two years ago. It’s a pseudo-Japanese compound, which I chose for its ambiguity. The original decomposition is “Chigai-jin” (違い人), which literally means “different person”. But [...]