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Anyone for Cantonese?
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Mark-O



Joined: 25 Jun 2003
Posts: 464
Location: 6000 miles from where I should be

PostPosted: Tue Feb 17, 2004 10:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Roger, what does your last post have to do with what is being discussed here? Sorry if I've missed the point ...
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Marcoregano



Joined: 19 May 2003
Posts: 872
Location: Hong Kong

PostPosted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 2:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mark-O...if I remember rightly from my last period of wasting too much time on this forum (around June/July 2003) you were trying to decide whether or not to do a PGCE/TESOL cert/come to HK...etc. What did you decide on?
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Wanbro



Joined: 09 Sep 2003
Posts: 19
Location: Hong Kong

PostPosted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 3:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mark-O - Roger was sharing his wisdom with me about the state of Cantonese in the rest of China - ie how useful it actually is outside of Hong Kong. In my own experience I'm not sure I entirely agree, although having been to only a few of the cities he mentions I'm not perhaps the best qualified to pass judgement!

Does this imply that Cantonese is a dying language? If, as Roger suggests, Guangdong and Guangxi are being linguistically colonised by Northerners, using the lingua franca of Putonghua, and even the overseas enclaves are being worn away, how long will it be before Cantonese goes the same way as so many other Chinese dialects of the past?

Am I investing hours learning a language that in 10-15 years might become obsolete?
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Marcoregano



Joined: 19 May 2003
Posts: 872
Location: Hong Kong

PostPosted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 4:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I really can't believe that a language spoken by 70-odd million people will expire so rapidly. Methinks Roger might be exaggerating a little. Agreed that Putonghua speakers have poured into Guangdong, but to have a significant detrimental impact on Cantonese, surely they would have to outnumber them significantly.

There has been strong encouragement for Honkongers to learn Putonghua for years, plus lots of Putongua-speaking immigrants into HK, but it has made very little impact here. In fact English has expanded at the expense of Putongua according to HK govt census stats. As for the future of Cantonese outside of HK, are there more Putonghua speakers in southeast China than Cantonese speakers? That is the question! Personally, I would find that hard to believe, except perhaps in some isolated enclaves.
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Roger



Joined: 19 Jan 2003
Posts: 9138

PostPosted: Wed Feb 18, 2004 3:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

some confusion here, guys! I said nowhere that Cantonese is going extinct, far from it. It's just being sidelined in big cities by migrants. Cantonese speakers continue to use it, many can't communicate in Mandarin, but Mandarin speakers don't have to learn the local vernacular.
The number of Cantonese speakers has probably remained static, while migrants have outnumbered local populations. In the case of Shenzhen: there were but a few thousand people here a generation back; now officially the SEZ counts somewhere between 7 and 10 million people at any time (I carefully refrained from using the word 'residents', though the majority are permanent dwellers).
Cantonese is in use in pockets on Hainan, in a large swathe across Guangxi, and many Vietnamese-Chinese, Indonesian-Chinese and CHinese elsewhere in the region are native Cantonese speakers - that's how the figure of 70 million has been arrived at (America's Chinatowns too seem to have attracted more Cantonese than others, see Vancouver).

Some people don't seem to understand the central government's policy of encouraging all Chinese to communicate with each other in Mandarin. This is an official policy that has lead many schools to strict implementation of it.
Calling Northerners "colonialists" is way off target - Cantonese is not a language, it's a dialect. It doesn't take Cantonese a long time to acquire perfect fluency in both dialects - there is very little beyond tones and pronunciation they have to practise.

On the other hand, I find it is not true to say Mandarin has not made enough progress in Hong Kong.
Precisely because it used to be treated as a "foreign" language until 1997, hardly anybody spoke it until the handover.
These days, bus drivers in HK often reply in their own broken Mandarin to questions in Mandarin.
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Wanbro



Joined: 09 Sep 2003
Posts: 19
Location: Hong Kong

PostPosted: Thu Feb 19, 2004 1:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Controversial... Cantonese isn't a 'language'? Merely a 'dialect'? How is it thus that a Mandarin speaker from Beijing will communicate with a native Hong Konger in English, as supposed to either of their 'dialects'?

Very few of my colleagues speak any Mandarin at all - a few words here and there, picked up from songs and the like - and certainly can't answer any of my questions that I regularly pose about the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese. But having said that, the ability to speak a little Mandarin crops up in the most unlikely of places (including bus and taxi drivers, as you mentioned).

As they are, by and large, mutually unintelligible, how is it that one is a 'language' and another a 'dialect'? Or are they both two dialects of the same one language? To call Cantonese simply a 'dialect' suggests it is not as 'correct' to use as the 'upper language' of Mandarin - but in doing so it denies a linguistic nation of somewhere up to 70 million people of a culturally identifiable tool, being their proper language.

I remember similar arguments when I was studying Catalan, and it continually being rammed down my throat that Catalan was NOT a dialect, but a totally different language. <That just happens to be remarkably similar to Spanish/French/Italian, and at times you could guess the meaning with relative success>.

As a relative new guy to China, I'd be interested in seeing the parallels... or lack of them...
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once again



Joined: 27 Jan 2003
Posts: 815

PostPosted: Thu Feb 19, 2004 11:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have just spoken to my wife on this issue..She is originaly from Fujian. She speaks the Fujian dialect, Cantonese, English and Manarin. Her oppinion is that Cantonese, although sharing the same written form as Madarin?puttongua, is totally different to Mandarin. I would also like to add that it is not easy,as Roger suggests, for Cantonese speakers to pick up Mandarin. If this were the case, then would all already have done so.
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Roger



Joined: 19 Jan 2003
Posts: 9138

PostPosted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 6:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

how interesting that a simple enquiry into the feasibility of studying Cantonese has over a few days developed into a debate on differences between various dialects, and, more crucially: is Cantonese a "language" or not?

It's a dialect as it has its roots in the common Chinese language. I am aware of the fact that learning one does not enable you to understand the other spoken variety; but Chinese characters are the same (although they don't use those old ones on the mainland any longer), and any Pekinger can read a HK newspaper; a Hongkonger may find it difficult to read a modern Chinese newspaper because he may not be familiar with the simplified characters now in use, but that's a matter of learning.
Speaking is but pronouncing and intoning the same words differently. I am not entertaining the illusion that this is "easy".
But over time one will recognise the same words in both varieties.

That Chinese tend to view their different vernacular versions as "language" is not surprising. There is no difference in their view since they use several nouns interchangeably in denoting human oral and written communication.
The most common difference you can find is the one made between 'yu' and 'wen': 'wen' would normally refer to the written form, whereas 'yu' is the spoken form (but this is not strictly adhered too).
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Lanza-Armonia



Joined: 04 Jan 2004
Posts: 525
Location: London, UK. Soon to be in Hamburg, Germany

PostPosted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 5:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I must say that learning a once significant language has it's perks. I lived in HK in 97 and loved the lingo but it's just to bloody hard. I now live in China and I'm flying through Mandarin.

Also the once dominant language of the south of China has fizzled out. I recently visited Guangdong and Hong Kong. In Guangdong I used guangdonghua and no bugger understood me. I refered to my Madarin and everyone was then nattering away at me, not without poking fun of my northern accent (Beijing, Shandong, Standard Chinese accent). Also, Fujian, Guangxi and Hainan have braced Mandy.

I enter HK, and find everyone speaks Chinglish so again, it's easy to 'get by'. I start using putonghua (Mandy) and everyone's intruged that a foreigner has the ability to pass over five tones (yes the are four but also a netrual tone which occasionally gets lonely, bless 'im).

End of story? Candy is soon to be riddled out and Mandy is gunna take place. Opinion, not fact.

LA
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Mark-O



Joined: 25 Jun 2003
Posts: 464
Location: 6000 miles from where I should be

PostPosted: Sat Feb 21, 2004 9:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Marcoregano - I'm impressed by your powers of memory! Thanks for asking - I'll PM you and let you know what I've decided
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Kurochan



Joined: 01 Mar 2003
Posts: 944
Location: China

PostPosted: Sat Feb 21, 2004 5:55 pm    Post subject: HKLLC Reply with quote

I took a two week Cantonese course at Hong Kong Language Learning Center and I would definitely recommend it to anybody who wants to learn! The price was reasonable, you have a choice of once-a-week or every day classes, and best of all, they don't bombard you with intimidating, useless information when you are just starting out. What I mean is, when you study Mandarin on the Mainland, typically the teacher stresses that there are all these different tones, and you have to get this and that perfectly right or it's a big disaster -- it makes everything really daunting. But, teachers at the HKLLC give you just a dollop of information at a time -- for instance, they mention that Cantonese has a lot of tones, but don't get really pedantic about what they are -- they mostly just tell you to mimic the teacher. As you continue, they start trying to get you to be more precise in your tones, but they don't do that too soon. They don't give you too much vocabulary for the short amount of time you have -- they concentrate on really useful daily life vocabulary, basic sentence structure, and repetition. That way you get the basics down, and can move on easily if you want to (or even pick up stuff on your own outside the classroom). Plus, what you learn sticks in your head rather than disappears when you end the class. They have branches in Kowloon (I think Yau Ma Tei) and Wanchai. If you want to learn Cantonese (they offer Putonghua classes too), I'd recommend them.
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prplfairy



Joined: 06 Jun 2003
Posts: 102

PostPosted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 2:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok people things are getting a bit muddled here on this Cantonese issue.

#1 Is Cantonese an easy language to learn? No
#2 Will Cantonese prove useful outside of this region? No, not really
#3 Is Cantonese going to be replaced by any other language as the predominatly spoken language in HK within our lifetime? No
#4 Is Cantonese by far the most useful language you can have at your disposal in Hong Kong? Yes.

So while it is not easy to learn it and some would woo you with the idea that Cantonese is halfway out the door and that Hong Kongers actaully speak Mandarin (they don't), the fact remains that it is the most useful language to know now in Hong Kong. There are alot of excuses to not learn the language that everyone is speaking around you but in the end it comes down to laziness. I've got nothing against laziness, I'm quite lazy but if you can't be bothered then just say so. The rationale that you're not going to learn a language because it might be obsolete in a few hundred years doesn't hold much water. Neither does the absurd idea that Hong Kongers have nothing intersting to say. I've met some pepole who smuggled themselves from China as refugees during the cultural revolution and others who are working for Amnesty International on human rights in Asia not to mention others working for universal sufferage who organized anti-article 23 demonstrations. If you're lazy then that's fine but don't try to distort the simple truth that Cantonese is, and will be for our lifetime, the most useful language in Hong Kong.
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Marcoregano



Joined: 19 May 2003
Posts: 872
Location: Hong Kong

PostPosted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 5:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK prplfairy, I accept most of what you say. I am a bit lazy and I should have made more effort with Cantonese than I have. However, while of course there are some interesting Cantonese people out there with great tales to tell etc, I maintain that they are exceptions to the rule. While I shouldn't generalise I will, in the interests of fueling some debate. Generally speaking, Cantonese people don't read and don't travel. They eat and they talk about eating. They play mahjong. They're obsessed with money and they talk about that too. Er, generally speaking, that's about it.
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Mark-O



Joined: 25 Jun 2003
Posts: 464
Location: 6000 miles from where I should be

PostPosted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 3:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Interchange 'play mahjong' for 'watching Eastenders' then that statement is just as valid for the British ... generally speaking, of course!
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Wanbro



Joined: 09 Sep 2003
Posts: 19
Location: Hong Kong

PostPosted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 6:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Marcoregano wrote:
Er, generally speaking, that's about it.


Erm.... but how would you know if you don't speak the language!!

Agreed about 'food' topic. That comprises over half of my daily conversations. <Have you eaten yet? Where did you eat? Can you use chopsticks? Do you like hot food? Have you ever eaten hot pot?>

Any money. Though I can't comment much on that right at the moment...

What else? Horses. Mobile Phones. Cameras. Laugh at the gweilo. Verbally abuse mainlanders. Food again. Andy Lau. Tung Chee-whatsisname. Standard of English teaching. Karaoke. SOGO and *that* new gym that just opened in Causeway Bay. Whether the new haircut makes them look Japanese. MP3 players. That 1997 soap opera. Rice or noodles? How cold it is. How hot it is. Comments about colleagues (which must be pronounced 'college').

That's what I've managed to glean from this lunchtime's chatter. But bear in mind I don't get half of what's going on, either....
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