Cantonese – The Easiest Language in the World?

When I started learning Cantonese there was no shortage of Chinese people warning me against it. At that time the most common refrain was: “It’s too difficult – for you“. OK, maybe they didn’t emphasise the word you, but that was the way I heard it. And it irked me no end! So I decided to learn to speak Cantonese well, to shut these people up once and for all.

I never took a single lesson, and for that I’m eternally grateful to myself and to all the people who have spent time (and money – on beer) teaching me the language free of charge. If I had started lessons from the type of people whose attitude is “you can never learn it” (something I’ve also been told often enough) I would probably have left after 20 minutes. As it was, I thought: There are 7 million teachers here. I’ll learn it in no time.

My course, although I essentially advise you to learn cantonese the way I did rather than take lessons even from me, is based on self-learning for the adventurous and the not-so-adventurous. The language is so simple that I’ve fitted more than 78% of it into a single page

and you can literally learn enough to take it from there yourself in 2 to 2.5 hours.

So I have developed a 2.5 hour crash course in Shopping In Markets where you learn numbers from 1 to 100 (11 different words), the names of vegetables and fruit (and beer) and how to get Chinese people to answer you in Cantonese and not English. Because that is what makes Cantonese difficult to learn. Not the grammar, syntax or pronunciation.

These courses will be running regularly throughout the spring, twice a month. The first course is Thursday March 3, 4pm (or at a time suitable for you.)

Contact me here for details. Other crash courses include Drinking In Bars, Shopping in Shenzhen and Arguing With Taxi Drivers.

去街市買嘢 – Heui gai si mai yeh (Go shopping in the market)
菜 – Choy (vegetables)
生果 – Saang go (Fruit)