Bunk Demythed! I Mean Myth Debunked!

Last weekend a group of three ecstatic revellers hopped on the ferry to Jung Saan (Zhongshan) and got straight in a taxi at the ferry pier and darted into the hinterland. In the lovely, slightly →

Guangdong Province! The Best Province with the Best People. It’s Yuge!

Guangdong is the best province in China, and not because of Cantonese! It’s got the friendliest people and the best hovelage. And today I’m off to savour her charms again! I just thought I’d share →

Hainan Highlights and Playing on a Swing

Last night I had a wonderful time in Central with my friend formerly known as J. Yes, I said ‘formerly’! For that was her name in the many South China Morning Post columns she appeared →

Wild Shenzhen Extravaganza

I always have a good time in Shenzhen’s famed Lo Wu Shopping Centre, even after several hours of “missy missy looking, you buy sunglass okay.” Still, I could really do with less nagging. My student →

Different For Chinese

As I was looking through my old columns from South China Morning Post trying to get some other newspaper gigs (do newspapers even exist anymore?) I found the above story from Norway. Allowed only 450 →

Enemy at 12! Avoiding Foreigners in China

Just for the record, in the first sentence of this column I wrote “.. black family that has – gasp – managed to become middle class and live in a posh neighbourhood.” I think the →

FINALLY!!!!

Ohhh this has been a long time coming! I didn’t realise how much I’d been missing Naked Cantonese and ah-Sa (mine co-host of yore) before I started to make podcasts – properly – again only →

Siu Heng! 肇慶

In the column below I bemoan the fact that my first Inner Guangdong town, (where I coined the phrase ‘hovelage’ – excellent traditional Chinese architecture made to last but a little careworn) has become a →

Damn Hunan Province!

Last month I went to Hunan province and after a few minutes there was overcome with shark flu (or some other fierce animal) – awful. Just awful. Anyway, so today, instead of advising you on →

Learn Sichuan Cooking!

Woo-hooo! WE did that! the happy cooks A, K and D are beaming, so pleased with themselves after studying Sichuan cooking for only two hours. (Chuanxing village spicy potato cake) Now you can also learn →

New Film: Learn Cantonese and Become a Babe-Magnet

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World Domination in Our Time

Why this photo? Found it and liked it again, innit.

Anyway, the other day one of my students suggested that I set up some kind of counting device; you know, something like the count-down to the sacred olympics or the one on the Religion of Peace website, counting how many deadly terror attacks this peaceful religion has carried out since 9/11 (I think it’s about 1,200), (whoops! Just went to the site. It’s 15 275) to count how many times a day I speak to a Hong Kong person in perfectly adequate Cantonese, only to be answered in execrable English.

That sounded like a good idea at the time. But then I realised I would probably wear out my fingertips within a week, so it kind of died a death.

So! Last Saturday we did the how to look up Chinese characters course again, with three new converts to our cause. I think world domination is well within reach.

After about 15 minutes of explanation and practice, my victim (student) ah-Lin said with a sigh: “If I’d known it would be this easy, I would have done it ages ago!”

That’s right. It is really easy. In fact the only people going on about how difficult it is are the Chinese, and how would they know?

Having said that; as if Canto wasn’t challenging enough, what with the people laughing at you, answering you in English or just “pretending” not to understand your Cantonese, reading the characters comes with its own problems: What it says in the dictionary isn’t what it actually means.

Take 想， seung, “want to.” In the dictionary it says “think about, miss.” NOT “want to.” But that’s the use of 想 in spoken Canto.

Last Saturday I wrote down a sentence in Cantonese for the novices to try to crack, and when they came to 而家 they got stuck. “But, and” and “home, family”? But of course, 而家 (yi ga) are just the two convenient characters used to write “now”!

So when you come across words that don’t make any sense put together, always say them ALOUD. Then everything will be made clear. That is to say: Another 1% of the puzzle.

Happy Jellyfish People’s Democratic Language Bureau: World Domination one word at a time.

I’m doing another course on Saturday! Beginners at 3, joined by people with a little background at 4. Roll up, roll up.