The Only Cantonese Lesson You’ll Ever Need (Crash Course in Light Conversation)
This week my first specialised crash course kicked off, with two excellent and fast learners, working titles ah-Lei and ah-Ga. In only two and a half hours, they learnt enough Cantonese to go into any →
Chinese Characters
Chinese characters (normal, not simplified) are beautiful, aren’t they? Even ordinary words like ‘toilet’ look somehow elevated to a higher sphere when they’re written with a brush, or printed for that matter. Not that the →
Learn Cantonese Without Really Trying: New Products
People are busy and don’t always have time to commit to one or two hours of studying Cantonese every week. But does that mean you can’t learn Cantonese? NO! With Happy Jellyfish Language Bureau’s many →
China Toilet Groove (Contains Video)
Everyone who travels in China for more than, say, five minutes, has something to say about her toilets. But I stand by my column (above) – they are nothing! Nothing, compared to only a few →
Sichuan Food … So Yummy and Right Here in Pui O!
There are as many types of Chinese food as there are people in China; approximately 1.3 billion different dishes at last count. That's more dishes than you and I go through in an average month! →
Ordeal of the Year
In January, okay, I admit it, I waited until the first week of February, came my annual ordeal: The visit to the vet. Why ordeal? It’s just some injections, and they’re not even on me. →
Stimulate All Your Senses on Lantau. Yes, all! Sichuan Cooking Course
Chinese New Year saw the Lo Uk Tsuen Country Club full of people coming to learn the basics of Sichuan cooking. Mature and younger, Lantau people and people from as far away as Britain – →
Congratulations, Get Rich!
It’s Chinese new year and the streets (and Facebook) reverberates to foreigners calling out to each other: “KUNG hei fat choi!” For one thing it should be GUNG hei, but hey. The tradition of spelling →
Enormous Oversight
About those language teaching videos (one Cantonese for beginners, one Cantonese for the more adventurous and, yes! I admit it! Even a survival Mandarin video called Stay Grounded) – all these years they’ve had this →
肇慶 Beautiful Siu Heng – Great As Long As You Don’t Dabble
Oh China. I love you so much. This is Siu Heng, the town where, on top of the many scraggy crags, there are signs (signage) exhorting people not to “parapet”. No Parapeting! the signs say →