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

New company! Everything you’ll ever need to do/know/eat in the world of Sichuan food. I can cook at your house, teach you how to do it, you can come to my house OR buy the →

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 →