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 →
This is how it started. We had dived into an upmarket restaurant because the temperature was dropping fast and it was raining; we just couldn’t bear the thought of another meal with our backs to →
Here is G with some lovely ha gau and another gau, ordered from the Chinese menu by him. Now you can also learn to navigate a Chinese menu with impunity! This Saturday, November 10th, I’m →
Christmas is ridiculously coming (in about a year) and my students have decided to take several months off. There is a lull and: You can step into it, becoming fluent in Cantonese around February next →
I’m SO glad I can speak Cantonese! Here is one of a million reasons: I just took the MTR from Central to Tung Chung and as usual there were no taxis although it’s about 200 →
I just rediscovered this film when a viewer had a question about the rules. Watching it again, I think it’s actually quite good. And suddenly I’m dying to play cards! Let’s start a cho dai →
Hoi hoi! Everybody everywhere, I can’t say this often enough: When you’re learning Cantonese: Get your course material in order. Something like the folder above, purchased by R, separating the material into categories, clearly labelled. →
The simplified characters menace is growing. Businesses all over Hong Kong are falling over themselves to accommodate mainlanders only, showing in a not very subtle manner that they’re not interested in local customers: by using →
This morning I had a Canto-lesson on my roof (Lantau people: Come to Pui O to learn Cantonese this summer!) and mentioned the word 雀仔(jeuk tsai) -bird. What? my student cried, aghast. Her daughter went →
Working hard on our new film Simply The Worst, a frightening sci-fi look at what happens when the government forces simplified characters on us. So I suddenly remembered the above film about speech-making communist language →
It’s no secret that Hong Kong people are very enthusiastic about fraternising with people from the medical profession at any opportunity. Last night one of my students turned up to the glorious Canto session with →
This year is the first summer for ages I’m not going north and I don’t like it! I want to go to Xinjiang in August. Meanwhile if you’re going anywhere in China this year and don’t speak Mandarin, I think you’d benefit from my travel guide (see above). It’s almost two hours of joy and fun, packed with useful Chinese characters and spoken Mandarin. Which is in no way anything like Cantonese, but damned useful in the northern provinces of Cantolania.
Just shoot me an email and I’ll deliver it to you post-haste.
Today I wanted to write a well-researched rant about Cantonese NOT being a dialect, a kind of sub-division, an inferior sub-division, of Mandarin. But I have to cook for 13 in a couple of hours, so I don’t have time to get into it.
Instead, I’ll give you the Cantonese word for a couple of ingredients:
青瓜 (cheng gua – green melon/cucumber)
花生 (fa saang – peanuts)
辣椒乾 (lat chiu gon – hot pepper dry/dried chillies)
