Make 2013 a Canto Year!

Have you made any New Year resolutions this year? I have. One of them is total world domination by Cantonese – while allowing the other languages to live too. Yes, that’s just the kind of →

The Enemy Within

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But →

Impress Your Friends, Feel In Control

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 →

This Is Your Big Chance

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 →

The War Against Cantonese – Now They Are Using Children

I spent last weekend in Zhongshan, birthplace of Sun Yat-sen and the original bastion of Cantonese. Not sure about the numbers but an incredible amount of immigrants to the various gold and hard-work slave-conditions hellholes →

Cards! (Who Wants To Play?)

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 →

Advice

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. →

Cantonese – The Movie Episode 32!!!!

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 →

Ridiculous System

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 →

Frightening Mandofication

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 →

Day Trip To Tibet

Not far from Lanzhou, transport and travel hub of the north, is the small town of Xiahe, dominated by the large and imposing Labrang Monastery. Last time I went there the main drag (the only drag, really) was being dug up and the dust and general inability to get around was unbearable. This year the road, black and shiny, was in place, but so were 53 new building projects (20 floor buildings with ‘Tibetan characteristics’) so it was exactly as dusty as before.

What was not as before was that every single Tibetan of the Tibetan Plateau had congregated in the town – some kind of dance festival in the monastery apparently. The place was absolutely packed with National Geographic-looking people in their finest silks, with braids down to theirs waists and their belongings wrapped in intricately worn blankets.

Throw in hundreds of monks with their deeply tanned skin, black hair and maroon robes and the place was a beauty fest the likes of which has seldom been seen. Then it started raining torrentially.

Tibetan Buddhism – the least horrible of all religions! And the guys look so incredibly cool and beautiful.

But it all came apart. We sat down in a place full of Germans writing anxiously on their laptops, and naturally chose the first thing on the menu, yak meat, or yake, as they called it. Two other dishes came and were sharked down, but the yak meat never came. Never. Combined with getting soaked, with spending eight hours to get there instead of the promised four and having to get a taxi back to Lanzhou, only the fact that we still had our health could save us. I want yak meat!!! It’s excellent, and not at all like chicken. Not at all. Tomorrow I’ll tell you all about how you must never, ever think of going to Xiahe, if you’re ever around those parts. But the town is beautiful, oh yeah.

Going Native

Stay Grounded

Chillies! Sichuan food made easy

Yam Cha

The Day After

It’s difficult for me when holidays suddenly pop up in the middle of the week. Yesterday I felt it was Sunday （禮拜日，lai bai yat) all day although it was Wednesday (禮拜三 lai bai saam), and thought “this has been the shortest week ever, oh no, how can life be so short, it’s not even fun anymore.”

This depressed me quite a bit, but not half as much as finding a bottle of frozen beer in the freezer had done a few days earlier. Say what you want but once beer has been frozen, it’s pretty much ruined. In the mainland they sometimes serve frozen beer with the lumps still blocking up the bottleneck. They say it’s because people don’t like warm beer anymore. What, is that our choice? Warm(暖，luen) or frozen(急凍, gap dong, urgent cold)?

Talking of unfathomable tragedy, I don’t think the 1st of July is anything to celebrate. A vibrant, capitalist economy handed over to a communist dictatorship, although it has some good breweries, especially 青島(cheng dou, green island, NOT “Tsingtao”)? Come on.

P.S.
Now you can take a crash course in bar hopping in Cantonese, complete with earning a “diploma” in a bar in Yau Ma Tei!! 油麻地 (Yau Ma DEI, oil grass ground)