No… that can’t be three years ago? But the calendar says it is. It’s just that it feels like a few weeks since we stood outside the railway station in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province, singing – could it have been Love Me Do? on Christmas Eve. That same night we went to a restaurant with the musical equipment and sang until all the other customers were driven away, the management buggering off early, leaving us to finish our drinks and lock up.
It was so cold, but so great! Because it was an adventure where anything could happen.
When you live somewhere for a long time and go to work, then home; perhaps with some running and dragon boating to keep fit, life can seem to be settling in some kind of ennui. Comfortable and safe, but perhaps a little boring? Leading you to wonder: Is this all there is?
NO! Now you can change your life in Hong Kong completely without really trying, making every day an exciting, weird and slightly surreal adventure. All you have to do is learn about 200 words of Cantonese!
With only a few sentences you’ll discover a world you didn’t know existed. Every day will seem new and fresh, and people will treat you completely differently. Yes, there will be disappointments, setbacks and of course the inevitable portion of light violence, but believe me, it will be SO worth it!
Make 2016 the year you conquer Cantonese. You know you want to.
三年 Saam lin (Three years)
三年前 Saam lin chin (Three years ago)
返工收工 Faan gong sau gong （Go to work, finish work/routine, drudgery)
Cecilie eats her way across Americas Chinese restaurants speaking only Cantonese. If the staff don’t speak Cantonese then she leaves….unless she is really hungry.
Would you like to travel around China but are worried about your Mandarin being not up to scratch (or non-existent)?
Now you can get all the Mandarin words and expressions needed for getting around the Middle Kingdom in this handy video which covers train and bus travel, hotel stay, eating and drinking and other situations you might find yourself in when you, like us, are going to for example Hong Kong to Kazakhstan, by train…
Cecilie visits China and looks at the fun side of life. More information soon.
Yes I know I’ve done 隻 （jek) before, but then I saw this 水牛，seoi ao, yesterday morning, and was lost in classifier-ation once again. It seems that classifiers are simplifying and that people often use →
I’m currently in Hunan province and thought I would share this, one of many wonderful English signs we’ve seen during the last few days, with you. Throwing garbage into the dustbin is indeed lofty behaviour, →
Have just come back from yet another extremely fulfilling and surreal trip to the hinterland – this time Shaoguan in the north-west of Guangdong province to which only the coincidence of October 1st, China’s national →
I have to say this sign gave me a start when I first read it. What, I could no longer add money to my Octopus card at Mui Wo ferry pier? That would be quite →
Some people say – well, so what if Mandarin became the official language (or as the South China Morning Post in its endless contortions to please everybody twists it into, the “official dialect”) of Hong →
Although it’s written in simplified characters: Cool! As! Bro! 涼！ The Cantonese language is under threat, and people all over Hong Kong and Southern China are banding together to show those Mando imperialists that not →
… when one of my victims spake up. I was just sitting around writing a blog entry the other day when: Wallop! Kristian, who’s currently in Norway working on the Norwegian Coastal Express (Hurtigruta) and →
拆 －CHAI. The ugliest word in the Chinese language. (Cantonese: Chaak) It means Knock Down. Demolish. Tear Apart. Chinese people joke about living in 拆拿， Chai Na, Knock Down and Take. When I went to →
You know you want to learn Cantonese without really trying! Well, this Saturday, in only 3 short hours you can learn everything you need to kick-start your Canto career. I’ll give you all the tricks →
Wei! I’ve discovered a new tea! Don’t know how it could have escaped me for so long, as often as I go to yam cha, but there you are. Maybe I’ve become too stick in →
I spent last weekend in Zhongshan, birthplace of Sun Yat-sen and the original bastion of Cantonese. Not sure about the numbers but an incredible amount of immigrants to the various gold and hard-work slave-conditions hellholes on earth at the time, came from here, spreading Cantonese around the globe.
That was before the communist party decided to make Mandarin, the dullest of stick-in-the mud languages … cool. I don’t know how they’ve managed this incredible feat; the language has hardly moved at all since 1949, it has only half of the vocabulary of Cantonese and it’s a communist speech-language for Christ’s sakes. It’s even been simplified so that idiots can read and write it, instead of lifting the idiots up to normal level. Talk about dumbing down.
The little boy in the photo above was a skilled unicyclist and whizzed around the square like a motorised vehicle with several more wheels. I noticed he talked Mandarin with his sister and had a chat with them after his performance. They could both speak Cantonese, being natives of Zhongshan and all, and yet, they conversed with each other in Mandarin. This is significant, because so far I’ve been hearing “we address strangers in Mandarin because it’s more convenient, and speak Cantonese at home”. “It’s just easier to speak Mandarin at once with people you don’t know instead of going through the ‘Can you speak Cantonese’ thing”.
But these were siblings.
I started listening more closely to children and the whole time I was there I didn’t hear a single child speak Cantonese. Not with his classmates, not with his parents.
Is this it? Has the government really won, making children think Mandarin is somehow better? (Or, as numerous posters strung up around the province say: Speak the civilised language, speak Mandarin.) I wonder what subtle threats they’ve made at the schools to make this come about. Something like in Britain 100 years ago when children were severely beaten/reprimanded for speaking Welsh or Gaelic? It’s 2012!!!
The parents must share the blame; they are in on it. They are very comfortable speaking two languages themselves, so why do they deny their children the advantage of being polyglot? It’s good for the brain, you lemmings!
I decided to increase my efforts to make Cantonese a world language. I’m taking the fight into China.
Learning or even speaking Cantonese is no game for the timid. It is, quite frankly, something of a never-ending fight with frequent setbacks and few triumphs.
The other day I was in the Holly in Tung Chung (which should of course be written Dung Chung 東涌). I’ve started to feel kindly towards this restaurant, hidden away as it is on the second floor on the “other” side of City Gate in the Fu Dung 富東 side of the tiled shopping machine that is Dung Chung, away from mainland hordes.
I go there at least once a week and have trained the staff not to plonk down jasmine tea without asking and to talk to me in Cantonese; all that. This day a short and apple-cheeked wench I’ve chatted with many times sidled up and, glory, immediately addressed me in Cantonese. (I never cease to wonder why it should be a thing of glory that locals talk to anyone in their own language.)
Apple-cheek: What kind of tea do you want to drink? 你飲咩茶呀？Lei yam meh cha ah?
Me: Water Fairy, please 水仙呀，唔該 Seoi sin ah, m goy
She left and brought me back an English menu
Me: I don’t need an English menu 我唔駛英文菜牌 O m sai yingman choy pai
Apple-cheek: Oh yes that’s true. Wow, that’s great. So, do you want a fork? 噢，係喎，你識睇體中文字。華，你好犀利。咁你要唔要叉呀？ Ou, hai woh. wah, lei hou sai lei. gam lei yiu m yiu cha ah?
One step forward, a million steps back. On the positive side, I haven’t been asked if I want a fork for about 15 years. Well, in the mainland of course, but that’s just to show that they are an upmarket establishment with forks (?).
Yes, a constant battle.
