Hello everybody, welcome to my roof! I normally arrange Sichuan dinners and lunches there, but this time it doubled as a recording studio for the best Cantonese news currently available on cassette! (And telex.) Talking →
A couple of weeks ago I interviewed the beautiful and delightful Zein Williams, mother of three and tireless champion for the Nepali people about her life and work – with the earthquake victims especially – →
Oh Cassette! Two weeks ago we went up to Guangzhou to see him live in his stand-up glory at a place called… Panda something? No! Paddyfield, an Irish pub right behind the Garden Hotel. Cassette →
I’m not a property owner but even if I were,I think I would still find it difficult to fathom how, when someone looks at the above vista, he thinks: I can dump a lot of →
Just for the record, in the first sentence of this column I wrote “.. black family that has – gasp – managed to become middle class and live in a posh neighbourhood.” I think the →
Above: BEFORE. Halcyon days of yore, etc. A part of the interlinked Pui O wetlands in 2012. A lovely, lush vista scattered with grazing water buffalo, egrets, starlings and other creatures, even fish have seen →
IMPORTANT!!! When you click on the link, scroll down to the alphabetical archive and click on C. Then you’ll see both my programmes. This isn’t strictly about Cantonese and it certainly isn’t about me, but →
All good things come to an end, apparently. Even life! Yes, compared to dying, losing a twice-monthly column in an increasingly obscure Asian newspaper is certainly a small thing. But oh! I loved that column. →
It’s up and running on Radio Lantau – CantoNews 2! The sequel! No, just the second programme in Cecilie and Nick’s Cantonese course, the finest course currently available on cassette. http://radiolantau.com/programme-archive/cantonews/C/7-cecilie-gamst-berg/4-cantonews/60-cantonews-2 This time we discuss →
I must write about Lantau again, because yesterday I interviewed Merrin Pearse, the leader of LIM (Living Islands Movement) whose introduction to the government’s “vision” for Lantau’s and therefore the people of Hong Kong’s future →
It’s been a year but finally more Cantonese. If you want to be in a film, give us a shout! This one wasn’t as easy to make as normally, logistically. But with iMovie and some →
This is the very first photo I had taken of myself in China (a Chelfie?) in 1988. It was in the then famous silk market, no doubt demolished now, and the guy was probably some seedy money-changing grifter named Wang. Or not! What did I care? I was ecstatic to be in China, roaming the streets on my Flying Pigeon bicycle, and, most of all, to be alive after the death-scare I had on my very first day in the country:
At that time I knew nothing about Cantonese, Hong Kong, simplified versus normal characters. It’s difficult to imagine now that I was once enraptured by simplified characters! I didn’t know any better. I still love the Beijing dialect though, where every sound is ‘aaahrrr’. Very masculin.
北京 (Bak Geng – Northern Capital/Beijing)
中國 (Jung Gok – Middle Country/China)
單車 (daan che – bicycle)
換錢 (wuhn chin – change money)
Happy Jellyfish Podcast Player
Yam Chaaaaaa! I go to Shenzhen with two victims, one of whom is a real Glaswegian! I’ve always said that Cantonese is the Glaswegian of Asia. A good fighting language, etc.
But far from fighting, we get along swimmingly over some tea and dim sum – and a visit to a disco taxi…
As imperial-Mando encroaches on our linguistic liberties, it goes without saying that more and more people who don’t like to be dictated to, want to learn Cantonese. But many are concerned about time, commitment, pain, →
一 張相 (yat jeung seung) （a sheet of photo.） Flat, rectangular things have the classifier 張。Also things that in the past have been flat and rectangular, like a sofa, (used to be a bench) →
