Back In The Filming Saddle! (Camera Dies During Filming of Mexican Wedding)

Woo-hooo. My last message was pretty depressed. I talked about how I have the least job satisfaction in the entire world, yea, even less than people whose job is warning people about the dangers of →

Wild Easter

Did you know that “Good Friday” is called “Jesus experiences difficulties festival” (耶穌受難節）（ye sou sao laan jit) in Chinese? I bet you didn’t. But now you know, and by going on an Easter trip with →

Bit More About Wetlands

I’m not a property owner but even if I were,I think I would still find it difficult to fathom how, when someone looks at the above vista, he thinks: I can dump a lot of →

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 →

Wetlands Lament

Above: BEFORE. Halcyon days of yore, etc. A part of the interlinked Pui O wetlands in 2012. A lovely, lush vista scattered with grazing water buffalo, egrets, starlings and other creatures, even fish have seen →

Bye, Bye, Column

All good things come to an end, apparently. Even life! Yes, compared to dying, losing a twice-monthly column in an increasingly obscure Asian newspaper is certainly a small thing. But oh! I loved that column. →

Careful What You Wish For

I must write about Lantau again, because yesterday I interviewed Merrin Pearse, the leader of LIM (Living Islands Movement) whose introduction to the government’s “vision” for Lantau’s and therefore the people of Hong Kong’s future →

Culture Cracks

Most of my live Cantonese sessions are done in the venerable Honolulu Coffee and Cake Shop, one of the last proper cha chanteng in Central. The last venue (see film above), whose name I can’t →

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 →

How (not) To Learn Cantonese

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 what people mistakenly see as “language skills.”

If learning a language was about a “skill” that some people have and others don’t, there would be millions of people on earth unable to speak their mother tongue. For the ability to pick up language with ease is the one thing that all humans have in common.

This evening I had to experience again for the thousandth time students of mine who can converse with me easily in Cantonese about almost any topic, turning around to Chinese waiters handing them drinks, saying “thank you” in English. From this I can only deduce that they always speak English to waiters and people like that, when they could just as easily (and more naturally, seeing we live in Hong Kong and the local language is Cantonese) have said 唔該。(M goi.) Yes, yes, so it’s so scary saying a single word in Chinese in front of me when they know that my Chinese is so much better, or something, but would they refuse to swim if they were thrown into the sea, just because their swimming teacher was thrown in with them?

I have to ask, if they’re not going to use Chinese on Chinese people, why do they spend thousands of dollars a year taking lessons from me? One of them explained (again I’ve heard this untold times) that she was afraid to speak Chinese because there was a possibility that Chinese people would then answer her with a barrage of Chinesewords, and then where would she be? What if she didn’t understand every single word?

This is where personality comes into the picture.

Some people welcome the “unintelligible stream of Chinese words” because it means that the person they’re talking to thinks they can understand. It is, in fact, a compliment. And although they realise that they can only make out one or two words in the barrage of words, they take those two words and run with them, guessing from the context what is being said, answering what they think is right and hoping for the best.

This is how children learn their mother tongue.

For you don’t think a one year-old can understand every single one of the thousands of words thrown at him by his parents every day, do you? No, he hears ” Blah blah blah BALL blah blah YOU blah blah NOT blahdi blah ICECREAM blah blah WE blah blah” and from the parent’s facial expression and body language and with experience and persistence and because he has no choice, eventually works out that this means “If you keep throwing that damned ball at my antique cabinet you won’t get any ice cream tomorrow when we go to the beach, you little shit.”

Learning a language is giving yourself up to being a child again, accepting that you can’t be 35 years old in the language you’re learning, but must go through the levels of understanding, the various ages of the language as it were, step by step. However, as an adult you have a huge advantage over a child in that you can use your adult experience and logic to wrest the language away from its proprietors.

Yes, it can be frustrating and irritating, but you have been through it before, at your mother’s knee. And that time, your only resort when you didn’t understand, was crying. Now, as an adult, there are so many more options open to you. You don’t even have to cry once! You can ask people to repeat, speak more slowly – a bit of perseverance will get you there in the end. One thing’s for sure though: You can’t learn Cantonese, or any other language, by speaking English.

After all, you wouldn’t try to learn the piano by playing the recorder, would you?

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