Yes, you can, but it is much more fun if you can talk to people who can’t speak English. Here’s an example of how it goes when you are at a loss and don’t know what to do and don’t have the words to ask someone. I was standing on a street corner looking lost one evening and two sweet girls came up to me and asked if I needed any help. Maybe I have a particularly lost looking face but I know it happens to other foreigners too. If you stand around looking baffled someone will come up to you and ask if you need help. Usually they have enough English to understand your problem and they always want stay with you long enough to be sure you get what you want, whether it is a train ticket, the correct bus and the right stop to get off at, or the right piece of fruit at a fair price.
There is a lot of talk around about Putonghua, known as Mandarin Chinese, which is based on the Beijing dialect, being almost useless to one who wants to travel around China because of the multitude of mutually unintelligible local dialects. It’s not true. It is true that each area has its own ‘hua’ (dialect, language). China is like an enormous Britain in the density of dialects and I think it is because it is a tonal language that the dialects verge on being mutually unintelligible, however, the more educated a Chinese is the more skilled in Putonghua so wherever you go someone will understand you. Most Chinese TV programmes are in Putonghua so most Chinese people have some grasp of the central dialect. If you’ve got the time and the energy and you want to come to China for any length of time learn Mandarin. Maybe your accent is terrible. The solution to that is to learn to write Mandarin Chinese. Another amazing thing about China is that every Chinese dialect uses the same written characters for the same meaning so you will find taxi drivers who can’t understand you offering you a piece of paper and a pen to write your meaning. Funnily enough, some of them have so little knowledge of the world that they think English, French or German are huas and therefore have the same writing. It surprises them when you can’t write the characters which could show your meaning.
I wish I had applied myself to read and write Chinese so I could communicate with people from all the districts of China but with a few hundred words of Mandarin I got started and now I have a lot of fun having conversations with people in my kindergarten level Chinese. It’s a big thrill getting my meaning across to someone who speaks a totally different language to my own.