everybody knows that. But how about beer, then wine, (Moet Et Chandon, saved since June 7th, thank you Teng and Lok!) then beer, then more beer and some beer? Queer is not a good →
四會 (Sei Wui – Four Congregations, small but excellent town in western Guangdong province) 白酒 (Bak jau – White wine, which in Hong Kong actually means white wine, but in the mainland a lethal liquid →
Last night I started watching the third season of Orange Is The New Black, an American show about life in a women’s prison. The first two seasons were pretty riveting in a ‘far too many →
I’m cooking for eight people tonight and I’m really looking forward to it. I will make Beer O’Clock Dumplings, Chicken a la Water Buffalo and Kung Fu Cucumbers, – among other things. Five other things, →
This morning I had some people from my village coming over for a dose of Cantonese, and since it was raining dog shit (落狗屎 – lok gau si [raining heavily]) we discussed the weather, well, →
You can’t see it yet but my website is being refurbished. The first thing I want to change is the cover of the Cantonese teaching videos Cantonese – The Movie and Going Native (see above). →
(Of course the phone the geezer in the photo isn’t talking on a Nokia while… resting? but it’s definitely some kind of phone.) But Nokia: Yesterday a guy driving through Pui O gave me a →
In our popular series Unusual Gifts we proudly present Sungflower Fream. What is this sungflower fream, you may ask? Why, it’s of course a notebook! The day my friend Jo gave me this gift, I →
A couple of weekends ago I had the privilege of going to Guangzhou with three fun people: F, J and AW. The following debacle ensued. (See article below) What didn’t make it into the piece →
Last night I went to a party that turned into something of a name-dropping fest. People had met Lady Gaga, various representatives of the Hong kong government, etc. I thought: Lady Gaga has a job →
When I started learning Cantonese there was no shortage of Chinese people warning me against it. At that time the most common refrain was: “It’s too difficult – for you“. OK, maybe they didn’t emphasise the word you, but that was the way I heard it. And it irked me no end! So I decided to learn to speak Cantonese well, to shut these people up once and for all.
I never took a single lesson, and for that I’m eternally grateful to myself and to all the people who have spent time (and money – on beer) teaching me the language free of charge. If I had started lessons from the type of people whose attitude is “you can never learn it” (something I’ve also been told often enough) I would probably have left after 20 minutes. As it was, I thought: There are 7 million teachers here. I’ll learn it in no time.
My course, although I essentially advise you to learn cantonese the way I did rather than take lessons even from me, is based on self-learning for the adventurous and the not-so-adventurous. The language is so simple that I’ve fitted more than 78% of it into a single page
and you can literally learn enough to take it from there yourself in 2 to 2.5 hours.
So I have developed a 2.5 hour crash course in Shopping In Markets where you learn numbers from 1 to 100 (11 different words), the names of vegetables and fruit (and beer) and how to get Chinese people to answer you in Cantonese and not English. Because that is what makes Cantonese difficult to learn. Not the grammar, syntax or pronunciation.
These courses will be running regularly throughout the spring, twice a month. The first course is Thursday March 3, 4pm (or at a time suitable for you.)
Contact me here for details. Other crash courses include Drinking In Bars, Shopping in Shenzhen and Arguing With Taxi Drivers.
去街市買嘢 – Heui gai si mai yeh (Go shopping in the market)
菜 – Choy (vegetables)
生果 – Saang go (Fruit)
Everyone who travels in China for more than, say, five minutes, has something to say about her toilets. But I stand by my column (above) – they are nothing! Nothing, compared to only a few →
Drowning in weather!
I got up at 5 having slept very little due to the absolutely wild weather that shook my house all night. Apparently the lightning had struck Lantau Island 3,000 times out of 3,007 for Hong Kong in total. But not a word about staying indoors and no transport suspended, unlike last week when two raindrops and a five-minute mild breeze sent government officials into a hysterical frenzy of “for your own safety” lockdown. I’m glad I had my large and sturdy cockroach umbrella (see above) when I dragged the extremely reluctant dogs out at 5:45
The wetlands were lakes, the roads rivers.
Did you know that the Chinese word for ‘electricity’, 電，(din) also, or originally, means ‘lightning’?
Think about that next time you turn on your computer 電腦,(din lou – electric brain). That modern invention is named after what must surely be one of the oldest words around.
Phone: 電話 (din wah – electric speech)
TV 電視 (din see – electric vision)
Lift： 電梯 (din tai – electric ladder)
Tram: 電車 (din che – electric car, although in HK it’s normally called 叮叮 deng deng)
OK! I’m rolling across the border to Shenzhen and losing ‘wai-fai’. Take my course! You’ll like it.
