How (not) To Learn Cantonese 2

How to learn Cantonese: By doing the above. Carefully sliding down, into the water, then swimming. In my first post about this topic a couple of weeks ago I used the swimming analogy – how some people when learning a language prefer to stay on dry land and reading about swimming from a safe distance, “until they can swim.”

The other day I thought of it again, when a student got quite irate with me. I felt I handled it not well so I said sorry and it was all good in the end, (the next week the same student had made a tremendous effort and the whole session was almost devoid of English) but it was because I was, for once, not as encouraging as I should have been.

It was something about him having talked to the staff in Park’n’Shop in Chinese – saying “幾多錢 呀" （gei do chin ah) and being understood and feeling immensely proud. I said that was great, but was it really so strange that they could understand their own language? And shouldn’t he have started talking to Chinese people ages ago seeing he had been studying for almost two years? This was very insensitive of me and I regretted it at once, seeing I believe in encouragement and try to encourage every effort.

It just came hot on the heels of the students from my last posting saying thank you in English right in front of my face to Chinese waiters, whereas they could discuss for example how to get to the airport and criminal law with me in Chinese. Yes, I was frustrated, and took it out on him.

And that’s the thing. What other tutors, for example swimming tutors, think it’s okay for their students to get in the water trying to swim, only after having studied swimming on land for almost two years?

So I said to this group that if you want to learn something – anything – you have to start practising at once; indeed, that everything in their lives they could now do well, they had learnt by doing it. Repeatedly. Whereupon another student in that group said “Well, that’s just your opinion.” Really?

Are dance teachers, kung fu teachers, piano teachers, hang-gliding instructors ever told by their students that it’s only the teacher’s opinion that they can only learn to dance by dancing, to fight by fighting, to play by playing and to hang by gliding, I wonder?

Then another student said that I was passionate about Cantonese and couldn’t expect everyone else to be as involved as I am. That is very true. But because they are paying me to teach them Cantonese, I thought perhaps it was because they wanted to learn it.

Anyway it all turned out all right and the next lesson was one of the best we had ever had with everyone really making an effort to keep it all in Cantonese – and yes, they can really speak fluently when they try. I just wish they would take their great skills into the world and take those Chinese they come across in their daily lives in a half nelson, using the great vocabulary they have acquired to actively communicate with normal Hong Kong people in the local language in the place where we all live.

I can’t count how many people have said to me: “Well, as long as you make a living, that should be enough for you.” But no, it isn’t. My main goal isn’t to make a living, but to enable all my students to experience the great joy it is to be able to converse with Chinese in their own language. If I just wanted to make a living, I’d be an accountant. I hear it’s one of the best-paid professions in Hong Kong. But it’s true, I am passionate about Cantonese. And that means that the sweetest music I can hear, is one of my victims saying: “Well, I have enough vocabulary now to take it from here. I talk to Chinese people in Cantonese every day, so I don’t need you anymore. But we can still be friends!”