Always have a phrase - Quick note about always having a phrase. I've found you need to have a phrase. My current phrase is "Everything wonderful, everything perfect". Once again it's a catch-22. If you say nothing, then you are a soft touch, so you get bullied even more, if you say something eventually it gets turned against you. I've tried so many different types. Happy, sad, angry. The current one is meant to sound a bit cheerful. But it doesn't really matter. Whatever you say will be turned into a stick to hit you with. If you impersonated R2D2 that would be turned against you too.
Other people do something similar. Some folks literally live in their current phrase. That's all they do. They do a sort of improv where they just say one of their phrases when it seems appropriate. In some cafees everyone is doing it. A sort of group speaking-in-tongues jazz improv sort of thing. They change the tempo, the volume, from murmours to loud laughter and eveything in between. But it's all, or mostly, gibberish. It often leads to hilarity, or arguments, or both, at least that's how it seems, it's not very hilarious if you are a stuck foreigner. #