My life goal is full global supremacy for Cantonese and I stand by it. However, that doesn’t mean that other languages can’t frolic happily alongside this most fun and happening of all tongues. Also, it →
Woo-hooo. My last message was pretty depressed. I talked about how I have the least job satisfaction in the entire world, yea, even less than people whose job is warning people about the dangers of →
While having lunch (or was it cocktails? Yes! Cocktails!) with my friend Jo in Tibet northern Yunnan the other day, I suddenly realised that few people in the world has less job satisfaction than me. →
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, →
The new year celebrations were hard for everyone this year, even man-sized teddies. This sad corpse was lying outside my hotel in Kunming, I’m guessing thrown angrily away by some girl who had expected diamonds →
If there’s one thing I missed during this Christmas and New Year’s Yunnan Extravaganza, it was the chance to do some serious Opulent Chair (or Sofa)- Sitting. How strange; Guangdong province is replete with ultra-opulent →
It’s well and truly next year! First I thought, I can’t wait for 2015 to be over, but then I stopped myself. The faster next year comes, the sooner I’ll be in the grave. So →
Greetings from Shangri-la, formerly a fictitious “idyllic settlement high in the mountains of Tibet” of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon fame, now a city in China. In this photo, however, we’re a few hours further south, →
Jesus hovering over the Great Wall? Why not. Jesus is everywhere so why not the Great Wall? It just looked so incongruous to see the cross in the middle of Dali’s old city as we →
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 →
The other day one of my students created a brilliant slogan. I was telling her about how local Chinese people think all Caucasians are complete idiots who can’t read numbers, don’t know what milk is →
I love you, kung fu! As the famous bluegrass composer Hank Scraggsville always said. What, didn’t I post this only a few days ago? Yes, but this time I have included the sound or transliteration →
In a country where the government is so hysterically set on everybody doing everything the government way, for example by banning beautiful, normal Chinese characters on buildings (it must be ‘crippled’, i.e. simplified characters or →
Photo: 四個靚女 (sei go leeng loy, 4 beautiful girls) Classifiers, measure words, counting words, whatever you want to call them, they are a vital feature of Cantonese. Here you can learn some of them through →
Four years ago thousands of people demonstrated for Cantonese in Guangzhou. Meanwhile the mainland government (aided and abetted by the HK one and Hong Kong and mainland people are hard at work trying to eradicate →
Today: Switzerland 瑞士 Soi si
Oh, Australia! Even yam cha is great there. Normally no one can quite get it right outside China (my experience consists only of Norway, the USA and Australia though) but in Australia they’ve got it →
“OK, we’ll have to write Seafood and Hotpot here in English too” “Oh shit! We’re run out of space!” “That’s okay. Just shorten it where you can. No one is going to read it anyway.”
The Uncle is currently in Australia, shooting a new film about the rubbish incinerator Hong Kong’s government is planning to build right outside my kitchen window. As usual, he does the bidding of his dear →
I took up the banjo partly to understand what it’s like to learn something new, better to sympathise with my students. Now more than ever I see the importance of practise. I have been practising →
I love English but sometimes its over-reliance on certain words to describe wildly different things irks me. Take the word have. While it’s nowhere near the top word, as in the word with the most definitions, namely set (439 definitions) it’s still a bother when it comes to learning Cantonese.
In the photo above I’m having a beer. In Cantonese I’m drinking beer. Isn’t that, dare I say, more logical? In English you can have food, have a cup of tea and have no idea. When you have a party it can both mean going to a party and hosting a party. And where do you have that cup of tea? In your gob? Under the bed? In your pocket?
In Chinese you eat food,(食嘢 – sek yeh), drink beer(飲啤酒 – yam beh jau), go toparty(去party – heui party) and 唔知 (m ji – don’t know) or 乜都唔知 (mat dou m ji – don’t know anything at all).
What I’m saying is: When you’re talking Cantonese with the Cantos, don’t think what the expression would be in English. Always think: What’s the action here? One thing’s for sure, it’s seldom have.
Having a beer and a good time! 玩得好開心(wan dak hou hoisam – playing well happily)
And yet, 有冇 (yau mou – have/not have) is probably the most important expression in the language. But more about that tomorrow! Now I’m going to “have dim sum” （去飲茶 － heui yam cha; go drink tea) with my dear Flying Eagle 飛鷹 (Fei Yeng), a man for whom I have great affection. 我鍾意佢 (o jung yi keui – I like him).
