Absolutely and very commonly!

Foreigners cannot speak Chinese - one of the eternal stereotypes plastered in a Chinese person's mentality.

"ting bu dong".

Happens all the time. They will ignore me in favour of my wife. When I am out with Koreans who can't speak Chinese it is funny. They become confused when the foreign looking person speaks Chinese but the Asian look person doesn't.

That's happened to me plenty. My Chinese is pretty good, I could manage here on my own, and yeh, plenty of times I've started ordering in a restaurant or some such situation only to have them turn to my wife for confirmation. It confuses me to the point I ask the wife if I spoke clearly enough, but I already know I did, it just doesn't register with some people that you're speaking their language when they've already decided you can't before you open your mouth. I had one experience in fact where I went into a shop alone to buy a bread knife. There was only one other person in there, the female shop assistant, a young girl in about her early twenties, and so I went up to her and asked, in perfectly clear Chinese, "Do you have a bread knife?" She looked at me in confusion, so I asked again, "Do you have a bread knife? You know, a knife to cut bread. Do you have one?" She'd started to back up at this point and I'd started to get a little annoyed, but I continued, this time miming cutting a slice of bread as once again I said, "A bread knife. A knife to cut bread. I need a bread knife. DO YOU HAVE ONE?" She was clearly rather flustered at this point, backing up the length of the shop toward the back door, and I was now so pissed off that instead of miming a cutting motion I started miming a stabbing motion as I followed her demanding, "A knife! A knife! I need a bread knife! Give me a bread knife! I NEED A BREAD KNIFE!!" At which point she turned and fled out of the back of the shop and I sighed and left. In retrospect I may have reacted insensitively to her confusion.

there is a catch-all phrase to criticise all such people's diverse insults, petty problems, rude behaviour and hostility. But i can only translate from Dutch: Doe normaal = Do [sth] normally.

90% of Chinese on the streets cannot act normally towards foreigners. It's quite embarassing, to the point that I feel empathic shame for the delusional person trying to single me out. They achieve nothing for themselves with it, besides feeling part of a group by ostracising outsiders. Luckily, I'm less sensitive to social exclusion than most.

I compare what they do, to my 2-year-old shrieking in a tantrum: With -30% hearing, my ears are not hurt by his shrieking, while his own ears hear it much worse. Chinese similarly care more about face than we do. They lose face because they have to go to such lengths to be deliberately rude to the people they envy. And if a foreigner gets annoyed enough to make an issue out of it, they are usually powerless to prevent themselves from begging for forgiveness. Losing face becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A bit related.   I dont know much Chinese, and I say that to whomever I happen to be in contact with at the moment..taxi driver, restaurant owner, etc.  On occasion, to me it seems some of the Chinese are rather annoyed that one didnt take the time to learn at least basic Chinese in order to operate in Chinese society. They seem to have the an annoyed attitude of "If you dont know my language, why on Earth are you here in MY country ?!?!"

All these stories are episodes from my life.

Last weekend the wife wanted to check out the new shopping mall nearby. After a bit of a gander at nothing we haven't seen before in every other identical mall in town, we decided on some food. To cut a long story short we finally found one that actually had some of the items on the menu available, but that's another story, anyway, we sat down and checked out the menu and mmmgoied the waitress. I ordered, she ignored me and looked at my wife. I tried a second time, still not a mark on the order pad. I can see my wife trying not to laugh, so i tell her that my wife is an ABC and speaks no chinese. She laughed and suddenly understood everything i said after that. Go figure.

Used to happen quite often when I was a nice guy, then I just stopped talking to any Chinese at all but my friends, I am actually the one who ignores them, be they speaking Mandarin, English or even German (OMFG a Chinese who speaks German?! I don't care) I look through them as if they were transparent and it makes them incredibly angry, "snobish laowai ignores me why?! how is that possible?!" Try it 

Like the others - of course!

One annoyance is when I tell them that my Chinese is very limited, or even just 'bu mingbai', they still rant on at the same speed with the same garble. Or, try writing it (in cursive, undecipherable script) - ppl, if you're going to write characters for someone who doesn't have that language as their first - write it nice and clear!!!)

I think my most frustrating (well, 2 actually) were:

In a shop ordering drinks. I had learnt enough Chinese to be able to say "yi bei chengzhe he yi bei natie" with enough semblance to be understood. I also knew the next question - hot or cold - was coming, and so replied 'bing'. Apparently, this was too confusing, because she asked again. And, again, 'bing was too confusing for her. My friend was then drawn into the translator role - and responded 'bing DE'... which then yielded the right responsive action.

Sort of similar to mArtAn - I wanted to order a chicken fried rice (I know about dan chao fan, and occasionally niu rou chao fan - but I like my chicken). However, something was wrong with my 'ji rou chao fan' as to be completely incomprehensible - in Shanghai! To a number of wait staff (who were obviously laughing at the idiot laowai...) - until some other Chinese guy obviously got annoyed with the idiotic restaurant staff and correctly pronounced what I want - in a tone that suggested they must be the idiots for not understanding!