You speak not speak Cantonese?


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January 17th 2008
Published: January 17th 2008
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My mind is buzzing with the excitement of learning a new language: Cantonese! We had our first lesson this week with my colleagues.
The teacher is a little bit unconventional because she is... Norwegian! Yes a little bit unusual you might say but actually it makes perfect sense. Who better than a foreigner can understand how difficult it is to learn a language? She has been living here for 18 years and according to a mutual friend her Cantonese (and Mandarin) is excellent.
For anyone interested in fun and good Canto classes in HK here is the link: http://www.happyjellyfish.com/

A basic question: what is the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin? China is a huge country as such there is no one language known as "Chinese". There are many different regions throughout the country where people speak differnt languages, and we are not speaking of some local variations of one main "root" language, we are actually speaking of totally varied ones. Mandarin is the language spoken by the majority in mainland China, especially in the economic and business hubs of Beijing and Shanghai. It's THE business language and anyone planning to live long term in China or doing business here should definitely learn it.
Cantonese is the main language spoken in Hong Kong and parts of Southern China. The odd thing is, it seems to me that if you actually go to the city of Canton in Southern china most people there speak Mandarin more than Cantonese, but anyway that is another subject matter.

So far, I've really enjoyed discovering how Cantonese works. It's a difficult language because it's all about getting the pronounciation right. Like my teacher says, you have a 50% chance of saying "penis" by mistake at some point in your sentence (as there are many other words that have a similar sound 😊. There are 9 tones, or ways to pronounce syllables (middle tone, middle rising, middle falling, low rising, low falling etc etc etc). So far in my tapes it's quite hard to distinguish.

The cool thing though is that the sentence structure is very simple. Once you know a verb, you don't need to worry about applying t to I, You, He etc etc. A sentence is just Subject + Verb + Complement.
For example: I to be Elisabeth. You to be faithful blog reader.
Asking a question is also easy: You To be / Not to be Elisabeth ah? ("Are you Elisabeth?"). The "ah" at the end is very important because it makes you sound more fluent, it does not mean anything but is just a way to end the sentence in style. Or something like that.

Ah yes and from now I will not be Elisabeth anymore but Lei-Saah (or Ah-Saah for close friends). This is my Chinese name given to me by my colleagues and which I sometimes use if "Elisabeth" is not understood.
I am still puzzled by the meaning though, I think it's Insect Sand. Poetic eih? :-)



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17th January 2008

canto accents...
hey your english teacher is on youtube! they interviewed her in cantonese for hong kong's atv! her accent is pretty decent for someone who's been living in hk for less than 20 years. there's another video of a british guy who's been living in hk for 30 years, now his accent is absolutely prefect. good luck with your lessons! norwegian woman (it's in 3 parts) part 1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs5CWBXm-JA british man http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXN-ajLm32M
17th January 2008

just want to add after watching her videos on youtube, her chinese calligraphy looks very neat! they also interviewed some of her students in part 2, i'm really impressed with her!!! :-)
28th January 2008

Accents
Hmm it's encouraging to see gweilos managing to reach that level of fluency. Give me another 15 years or so, I'll do the same :)

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