Last week my glorious sister Beate came to spend Christmas in Hong Kong which she did and how. But no trip to Hong Kong is complete without a trip to Shenzhen. Is it? No, it →
Last night I shared a taxi from Tung Chung – oh how it pains me to spell it that way when it’s pronounced DUNG Chung – with a boy and his domestic helper. I noticed →
I spent the weekend in Shenzhen and it was lovely. As I walked around in the sunshine Sunday morning I suddenly realised why I’ve been so unhappy recently. Well, ISIS, WWIII is coming, all that; →
Life is funny eh? You think you know something or at least are fairly familiar with something, and then something happens that sends your whole world view tumbling to the ground. Me, I thought I →
Here’s a gaff in my favourite village in all of China, Chuanxing 川興 (Chuen Heng) near famous satellite centre Xichang 西昌 (Sai Cheung) where the moon is rounder and brighter than in the rest of →
This is the kind of joke I like. Clean, but not without teeth! Talking about vexed – the word for angry in Cantonese is 嬲 (lao). The character shows one woman between two men, so →
It’s Sunday morning and I just finished doing the dishes from yesterday’s Sichuan food blowout extravaganza wonder party. Chilli oil tastes wonderful but is a bugger to get off plates and worktops. But it’s worth →
Here is my fine hound Lasi, rocking the look with a handmade collar from Ciao Puppy. When I named her Lasi, it was meant as a knowing pun. In Cantonese, La Si (拉士) comes from →
Rain, rain and I’m stuck in my office writing a book. I like books, I like writing, but I don’t like being stuck! In times like these, my thoughts inevitably turn to travelling, especially thundering →
The Transport Department has just made my life a little bit worse. As if ten or more minutes of every ferry trip, twice a day, being taken up by screaming public announcements in three languages →
In yesterday’s article I talked about how expressions containing the word ‘have’ in English hardly ever contain 有 (yau – have) in Cantonese, such as have some Mons (飲雪花 yam Suet Fa – Drink Snow Flower), or
have a certain electrifying air about him 好特別 (hou dak bit – well special), or
have a bite to eat 食嘢 (sek yeh – eat stuff).
For fun I had a look in my dictionary. Its author has taken this ‘everything in English is about have‘ to heart to such an extent that she has listed what seems like most verbs under have.
(The first entry in that dictionary is dizzy, listed as under A as ‘A little dizzy’.)
Here is a collection:
Have a cold 傷風 (seung fong – suffer wind[the wind that blows through your hair, hello])
Have a dream 發夢 (fat mong)
Have a lawsuit 打官司 (da guhn si – hit hall take-care-of)
Have a shock 受激刺 (sau gek ji – receive irritate thorn)
Have a sad look 愁容滿面 (chau yong muhn min – sad expression full face)
Have the tooth filled 補牙 (bou ah – replenish tooth)
As well as of course ‘Have a stool’ (bowel movement), ‘have indigestion’, ‘have a fire’ and many other haves. The point is that none of them includes 有 (yau – have)!
Tomorrow I’ll try to find some that do.
Meanwhile, why don’t you take an intensive Cantonese course this August? One hour three times a week; you’ll be fluent before Christmas.
Cantonese is a war and we’re going to win it. We’ll put the fun AND the mental back into “fundamentalists”!
Anyway I have a new and eager recruit here by the name of Ah- … well, I haven’t given her a Chinese name yet. But she sounded young and beautiful on the phone. Young, beautiful and ready to take up arms for the cause!
The cause, the cause, the glorious cause: To make Cantonese a world language. This year.
So if there’s anyone out there who would like to take Cantonese lessons in the afternoon, say 2 to 3 pm, please sign up! We can start next week if you like. If you start next week and follow my instructions, you’ll be able to talk to anyone about almost anything by Christmas!
People! I can’t recommend Newark Airport enough! A mere 20 minute drive from downtown Manhattan, (or 12 hours’ drive from Shaker Village Kentucky as the case may be) is this place where, unlike JFK and San Francisco airports, both of which I’ve tried in the last two years, you can get through check-in AND security in 10 to 12 minutes.
It would have taken only 10 minutes for me if it hadn’t been for the automatic scanning check-in had a problem with my non-existant Hong Kong “visa”.
Ha ha HAAAA! I assured the official bustling up: I am, my good man, a permanent resident of the fine communist colony of Hong Kong and have the card to prove it! I don’t need any plebs-y visa.
And with that, I zoomed through security, stopping briefly to demonstrate that my necklace (Shenzhen special) wasn’t an intricate bomb although it showed up on the scanner like a huge menacing yellow death-threat around my neck.
But the toilets were grim and under-doored. Yes, of course Liberty Airport isn’t as good or half as good as Hong Kong’s 赤鱲角 (Chek Lap “Kok” [as usual it should be GOK!!!!!]) airport. BUT I think its name is better. I think ‘liberty’ has a better ring to it than ‘red fish with bristly dorsal fins point (or Red Perch Point). But that’s just me. Right?
自由 (Ji yau – freedom, liberty)
機場 (Gei cheung – machine park/airport)
簽證 (Chim cheng – signature proof/visa)
Please buy my new book about Sichuan cooking from this site!
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 →
There are as many types of Chinese food as there are people in China; approximately 1.3 billion different dishes at last count. That's more dishes than you and I go through in an average month! →
(None of the people in the photos were quoted – or hurt – during this blog entry) Perhaps it’s inevitable when people are starting to learn Cantonese that they will feel themselves transported back to →
In January, okay, I admit it, I waited until the first week of February, came my annual ordeal: The visit to the vet. Why ordeal? It’s just some injections, and they’re not even on me. →
Chinese New Year saw the Lo Uk Tsuen Country Club full of people coming to learn the basics of Sichuan cooking. Mature and younger, Lantau people and people from as far away as Britain – →
It’s Chinese new year and the streets (and Facebook) reverberates to foreigners calling out to each other: “KUNG hei fat choi!” For one thing it should be GUNG hei, but hey. The tradition of spelling →
About those language teaching videos (one Cantonese for beginners, one Cantonese for the more adventurous and, yes! I admit it! Even a survival Mandarin video called Stay Grounded) – all these years they’ve had this →
Oh China. I love you so much. This is Siu Heng, the town where, on top of the many scraggy crags, there are signs (signage) exhorting people not to “parapet”. No Parapeting! the signs say →
威士忌 – Wai si gei (Whisky) 酒店 – jau dim (Hotel) 唔舒服 – m syu fuk (Not well)
The shooting of new, from-scratch Cantonese course CantoNews continues. This time we went to a thrilling location, the luscious OYC Hotel in 肇慶 (Siu Heng) in Guangdong province, a mere four hours’ comfortable train journey →
