Be The Gwai!

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 →

Old Granny New Posting

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 →

Down With Simplified Characters

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 →

Back By Popular Demand: Classifiers

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 →

Pro Cantonese Column SCMP

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 →

New Series! Countries Of The World In Cantonese

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 →

Space-saving English

“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 →

HAVE!

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).

CTM 13