[mmkhd]

I like your Chinese culture comparison and the Englisch language has such a word, too. It's "experience". True, you also can have "an experience", but generally it is used in the sense of "having experience" which is having accumulated mastery over time. In German it is "Erfahrung" which maps 1:1 to experience. I like, that Chinese, Englisch and German have common ground, showing that the "human experience" is something quite universal across cultures.

[hosh]

The way "experience" is used in English and in modern American culture has a very different connotation, mindset, value, and frame. In its use in the hiring/HR world, and in the subcuture of wargaming and RPGs, "experience" is understood as a quantity and does not convey the depth of meaning as "gongfu". It's why there are some martial arts teachers who say, "Americans are no good at gongfu" -- not in the sense of not being good at martial arts, but that there's a cultural thing that makes "gongfu" easy to be misunderstood.

The closest term I have seen to "gongfu' in English is the ancient Greek loan word, "arete", which is usually translated as "excellance". What's important to note here is that both "arete" and "gongfu" are understood as quality, not quantity.

For example, you'll hear "Adam has 20 years of experience", or "Barbra has 5 years of experience", but "Adam has 20 years of gongfu", and "Barbra has 5 years of arete" doesn't make sense.

[mmkhd]

So maybe the German "Erfahrung" does not map 1:1 to the concept of "Experience". But maybe it is not so much a lack of concept in the language, but something that is related to particularly American hire-and-fire culture, where every employee is an easily replaceable cog in a machine, whereas I think that the full depth of many tasks is not easily conveyed in a documented standard operating procedure, but often needs the actual experience in doing things often. (This is of course an over generalization, because we seldom hear form the established well run smaller companies. You hear much more about dysfunctional companies and dissatisfied employees on the Internet.)