I’ve just come back from another Russian lesson with the excellent Dimitri. People: You think Cantonese is difficult – try Russian. Every word, I mean noun, adjective, verb and adverb, has hundreds of different forms. Even numbers change wildly according to what comes after them. In Cantonese, dollar(s) have only one form: 蚊 (man) . In Russian there are three ways to say “ruble” depending on how many there are. In Cantonese, if you can count to ten and know the words for hundred, (百） thousand (千）and ten thousand (萬） you can basically count to as many millions as you want, using the same one-syllable words. In Russian, between 1 and 100 there are probably 50 different pronunciations with the number 40 suddenly taking off from the pack and having nothing to do with the number 4.
Then there are the genders of course, and every bloody word veering off to the left and right with only the first syllable (if you’re lucky) known to man. Endings, beginnings, things depending on whether there is one, four or more than five of the bloody thing … It’s like mathematics.
When I’m in the room with Dimitri I go into a kind of trance and can kind of communicate with him by remembering the first few syllables of words and mumbling the rest. When I stand on the pavement outside, shaking lightly and not knowing which direction to walk, I think: What was that all about? If you’d held a gun to my head I wouldn’t be able to remember what had gone on in that room three minutes ago.
So students of Canto: Embrace the Canto. It really is SO easy! When you know ten words, you actually know a hundred words. Whereas in Russian those words will be 1,500 different-sounding words which you have to memorise one by one. I’m just saying.
And the buffalo? Well, that’s a Russian bear with horns.
I was hoping I’d never have to write this (again) but here it is: My blog www.chinadroll.com has disappeared from view, and it’s SO not my fault. I was a customer of theirs for 3 1/2 years, paying them shitloads of money, did what they told me to do and generally shut up and put up.
Two weeks ago I wanted to move my blog to a different, better and much more reasonably priced host; the one that’s hosting this website in fact. (For during the 3 1/2 years Sunny Vision has been hosting me, they have shown themselves to be staffed by … possibly orangutans? And not the one million ones that together could hammer out Shakespeare either. The orangutans that were thrown off the Ark for being too ape-like.)
I sent an email to Sunny telling them to bill me for whatever it costs to move to a different host, as well as giving me the password etc to pass on to my computer guy.
They shut down my blog that minute. That’s right, couldn’t even keep it there for a couple of hours while the excellent Stephane worked his magic.
There is a post about this from two years ago on my other blog, which is currently floating up there in the stratosphere somewhere, waiting for permission to land. Meanwhile I’ll just have to rely on text messages and nailbiting.
WHATEVER YOU DO, never go into ANY kind of economic partnership with Sunny Vision! They should be called Sunni.
The other day, one of my Cantonese students said to me (no name; in fact there are depressingly many people who now have the same mindset, which helps the misconception to become true) “Well, it’s →
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