Crash Course on Saturday!

Saturday February 14: You’ve had chocolate and romantic meals so many times in your life. Why not spend this Valentine’s Day morning on something useful? Like learning Cantonese through the excellent medium of dim sum? →

From Deepest Despair to Highest Happiness

Had a terrible shock in Shenzhen earlier this year when the food hall in Lo Wu Shopping Centre closed down with little or no warning. Then I remembered a comment from wise shopper Andrew and →

Old Granny New Posting

I love you, kung fu! As the famous bluegrass composer Hank Scraggsville always said. What, didn’t I post this only a few days ago? Yes, but this time I have included the sound or transliteration →

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

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.”