“Oh sorry, I’m so sorry” this woman is probably not saying. Naw, she’s just serving me some excellent Sichuan food, probably.
Anyway, I can’t begin to think how weird it must be for the people whose first language is English when they start learning Cantonese as their second language. How bewildering that “sorry?” in Cantonese doesn’t mean “I didn’t hear what you said, could you say it again?” No, Cantonese is logical. How can you be sorry if you haven’t done anything wrong? ‘I didn’t hear you’ should be 咩話？(Meh wah? What word?) or in some cases 你講咩嘢呀? (Lei gong mat yeh ah, you say what thing, what are you on about.)
吓？咩話？ (Ha? Wot word?)
Not only that – when you really have done something wrong, there are two different ‘sorry’. The first one is the only one you hear a lot at least here in Hong Kong: 唔好意思。(m hou yisi – literally Not Good Intention or Don’t Intention. Presumably “it wasn’t my intention” and indicates slight embarrassment.) It’s the kind of sorry you use if you’re a few minutes late, if something’s unavailable, you can’t come to the party Things that aren’t necessarily anything to do with you.
Now 對唔住 (doi m jyu, face-not-ing, I can’t face you), that’s the biggie. You have dropped an anvil on someone’s toe, scraping off the beautiful nail polish pattern she had just had made in an expensive nail bar in Central. Now you feel real shame and can’t even face your victim.
Use sparingly! Otherwise you’ll be held responsible. Or something.
P.S.
You can learn many more such expressions by taking courses (regular or crash) with me this summer. Get some friends together and learn Cantonese without really trying!
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) →
I’ve just come back from a weekend in inner Guangdong province, cradle of Cantonese language and culture, with the above delightful couple, Ah Laan and Ah Gei. I knew they would like the funky and →
一間茶餐廳 “Yat Gan Cha Chanteng” – One Room of Tea Restaurant. “Gan” 間 is the classifier for buildings and rooms, as in 一間廁所 “Yat Gan Chi So” (One Room of Toilet) – A Toilet, 一間酒店 “Yat →
Repeat after me: YAT JEK GAU 一隻狗 ONE DOG That’s right! “Jek” (隻) is the classifier for mammals, things of which there are two (一隻眼睛）yat jek an jeng (one eye), round things, so an eye →
Every Wednesday I meet these two delightful women, Ah Bek and Ah Wai, plus three others, in a Jau Lau （酒樓，Chinese restaurant) for tea, dim sam and Canto. All the waiters and waitresses love us! →
This is ah-Fa, one of my long-term Cantonese students. You see that piece of paper she’s reading? I wrote that the same morning and emailed it to her. Out of all those Chinese characters, there →
I’ve made a film about my experiences during 20 years of learning Cantonese. Cantonese is a really easy language to learn (contrary to people’s deep-held, sacred beliefs) – it’s just that it’s so damned difficult →
Wei, students and others: I work day and night to make Cantonese a world language. You are my tools for accomplishing this. I would like to hear about your experiences using Cantonese in your daily →
When the communists, soon after they came to power in 1949, introduced simplified Chinese characters, it was ostensibly to reduce illiteracy on the mainland. However, their real objective was to enable peasants and other illiterates →
As I was looking through my old columns from South China Morning Post trying to get some other newspaper gigs (do newspapers even exist anymore?) I found the above story from Norway.
Allowed only 450 words I couldn’t quite cover all the things the guy said about all the things that are only for Chinese people (Chinese cooking, Chinese eating (unless with forks), Chinese language, characters… pretty much the whole thing, except swinging around to look at the Great Wall occasionally, perhaps).
Of course that was nothing I haven’t heard a hundred times before, even, no, especially in Hong Kong: “wow, you can even go to the market”! but I have to wonder why it’s “of course I eat sandwiches every day, but you’re not supposed to even know about gong bao chicken, that’s for Chinese!”. Is the brainwashing from young about Chinese things being hidden, special, protected and only for Chinese (or so inferior/superior that only Chinese could possibly be interested in/understand them) so pervasive? Or maybe they’ve all read Rudyard Kipling’s poem about East is East and decided, once and for all, it was true?
I’ve been hearing the same for 27 years from probably 85% of all strangers I’ve ever talked to, so it can’t be a one-off.
As usual, if Caucasians told any of those things to Chinese living in western countries, there’d be a trotting down to the magistrate’s court like you’ve never seen.
南華早報 – Laam Wah Jou Bou (SCMP)
三文治 – Saam man ji (sandwich)
中餐 – Jung chan (Chinese food)
Talking of Chinese food – book a dinner at my Sichuan restaurant today! Minimum 6, maximum 18 people.
You know, you don’t have to commit to a whole awful hour a week. No, you can take Happy Jellyfish People’s Democratic Language Bureau’s three hour crash course!
Perhaps even a crash course sounds too daunting to you. You want to speak Cantonese, but don’t want to go through the process of actually learning it. But the day comes and pushed by your wife/boyfriend/colleague you’ll be dragging yourself into the Honolulu (home of Cantonese) shivering with fear and without being able to utter more than a simple 早晨 in Canto. Your brain will scream “No! No! You can’t make me!” inside your head, while you hold on to the doorframe for dear life, claiming you’re ‘crap at languages.’
And yet! Only three short hours later you’ll be strutting, nay, sashaying down the street, with a cheerful remark to all and sundry, ordering beers and what not in the dulcet tones, that song of angels that is Cantonese.
No commitment! Just one little afternoon.
I’m also doing a crash course in how to read and write Chinese characters next Saturday. Sign up, sign up.
