Can you learn Cantonese from a book? I would say no, not least because of the crazy spelling that bear little or no resemblance to the sound of the words.
Can you indeed learn any language from a book? Again, I’d say no. I think it slows down rather than speed up the process. The best way to learn anything is to do. So yes, if you want to learn to speak Cantonese, the best way is to speak Cantonese.
Having said that, reading books; good literature, biographies, history books is of utmost importance to keep your brain and sense of adventure and curiosity in shape. It’s like athletes. If they want to succeed, they train not only kicking the ball (or whatever) but the whole body. Some football players, I have it on good authority, even do – dance! I’m 100% sure that if I hadn’t read up to 30 books a month as a child, I would never have thought it was possible to go and live abroad and become the only Norwegian Cantonese teacher in the village.
In Pui O where I live, a teacher has transformed the English department by starting a reading programme where the students can choose what they want to read! That’s right, instead of having Shakespeare and Chaucer stuffed down their throats, killing their love of reading and words forever, they read what they think it’s interesting. If they don’t like a book – they just leave it and pick another one!!!
Sean Earl has the right idea, and the tiny Pui O School with its 50-something pupils is now doing better in the reading and writing of English than its international school counterparts. Wooo hoooo!
Listen to my interview with Sean here on Radio Lantau. (As usual, scroll down until you see the archived post.)
睇書 – Tai syu (read book)
我好鍾意睇書 – O hou jungyi tai syu （I love reading)
貝澳小學 – Bui O Siu Hok (Pui O primary school)
Here is Peter (ah-Dak) who’s been taking Canto lessons with me for some months now. When we went on our first trip to Guangdong province together at the end of last year, he immediately went →
That’s right; double whammy today! The classifiers for vehicles and trees!!! 樖 (po) is classifier for trees and plants (but a flower is 一枝花 （yat ji fa) a twig of flower. 呢樖樹好X靚呀。（Li po syu hou →
Yes I know I’ve done 隻 （jek) before, but then I saw this 水牛，seoi ao, yesterday morning, and was lost in classifier-ation once again. It seems that classifiers are simplifying and that people often use →
I’m currently in Hunan province and thought I would share this, one of many wonderful English signs we’ve seen during the last few days, with you. Throwing garbage into the dustbin is indeed lofty behaviour, →
Have you read ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell? Splendid book, absolutely fascinating. Eye-opening, funny, full of a-ha moments, it spurs you on so you have to get up at 5am to finish it, having started at →
It’s not a rare occasion for Happy Jellyfish People’s Democratic Language Bureau to go to Shenzhen and have clothes made, as well as buying fake Ray-Ban’s. But no trip to Lo Wu Shopping Center has →
It’s Christmas Extravaganza number 3! Please forward it your friends so we can get some viewing figures here. And Merry Christmas, hoi hoi hoi, 聖誕快樂！
How to learn Cantonese: By doing the above. Carefully sliding down, into the water, then swimming. In my first post about this topic a couple of weeks ago I used the swimming analogy – how →
I’ve realised for many years now that learning a language, especially a language like Cantonese where the locals’ resistance to foreigners (Caucasians) acquiring their language can take on epic proportions sometimes, is about personality, not →
Ah-Laan and I were on a train the other day, playing cards with dudes. Suddenly we were talking some seriously bad language … Outcast 2. Traincast
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 →
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 →
My daylight hours are starting to fill up with Cant-studs (Cantonese students) coming to my house, and of course I have to offer them something for struggling up all those stairs and paying me. As →
Finally, after almost a year of writing and researching (the research consisted mostly of doing the dishes) I have finished my new book CHILLies! Sichuan Food Made Easy. It looked so alluring with the iBook →
While writing about 墨西哥 (Mak Sai Go – Mexico) the other day, I started thinking about other countries I absolutely must go to. The first one on my list is, naturally, North Korea 北韓 (Bak →
The New China Bookshop in Guangzhou, or actually, the New China Bookshop in general, is a real treasure trove. Look what I found there last weekend, a map of Mexico with all the towns and →
Are spiders actually really stupid? I mean they can spin these beautiful webs, masterpieces of engineering and all that, but are they a bit dim all the same? This morning I had the first proper →
嗰個人係四川人 (go go yan hai Sei Chyun yan – that piece person is Four River person, that person is from Sichuan) 嗰個人 (go go yan – that piece person). That should be pretty plain sailing →
I’ve just travelled 25 minutes there and 25 back just to eat. What, didn’t I have perfectly good ingredients for Sichuan food in my fridge? you ask. Yes, of course. But no matter how good →
One of the most wonderful of many wonderful things about mainland China is the train. Last weekend we went to Guangzhou for some r and r and it was good, but the best thing was →
