Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

But it’s much easier than Cantonese

Mar 3, 2006

Have to agree with Paul over at The Valley on this one.

A typical conversation between a Gweilo and a local in Hong Kong goes something like this: "yes, Cantonese is not easy. You should learn Mandarin – the tones are easier, and it’s much more useful".

Say you were living in Hong Kong and you were surrounded by Cantonese speakers, your wife was a Cantonese speaker, the Radio and TV blared at you in Cantonese, the only way you could order local food was if you spoke Cantonese, and to scratch your ass you needed to ask permission in Cantonese, but Mandarin was considered to be slightly easier to learn, which one would you choose to learn.

The only argument I can thing of for learning Mandarin is that an improved Chinese vocabulary would help with Cantonese, but it might actually leave me more confused, and it cannot possibly be an efficient way to improve my pathetically limited Cantonese.

Of course, In the unlikely event that I were to move to the Mainland (or have to spend an extended amount of time there), then it might make sense to learn Mandarin, but as long as I am here in Hong Kong I don’t think it matters how "easy" it may be, I won’t be learning Mandarin.

Posted in Chinese language, Life in Hong Kong

11 responses to “But it’s much easier than Cantonese”

Argleblaster

Mar 4, 2006

To continue the conversation, my gweilo answer is usually along the lines of, “So, with mandarin being so useful and easy and all, how come everyone around here speaks cantonese?”

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spacehunt

Mar 4, 2006

Just learn what you want to learn. When it comes to new languages none of them are easy. Plus the vocabs are different enough that it would confuse you more than it would help.
Argleblaster, you can take that argument further… how come everyone around here doesn’t speak English?

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weenie

Mar 5, 2006

I’ve been working in Stockholm…everyone speaks English. Hence I’ve not bothered to learn any Swedish..which is just so lazy. But very British!?

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Girl Weaver

Mar 5, 2006

What you said is quite true. Although Putonghua is very useful and easier to learn because of the number of tones, the environment is very important to facilitate. It is also a way to get into the culture to know “what/who” you are dealing with. ;)
So are you interested in the dialect (Cantonese) or just because of it’s practicality being in Hong Kong? If you know Chow Sing Chi (Stephen Chow… a Cantonese actor), you will find that this dialect is very dynamic, clever and funny.

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Winza

Mar 5, 2006

I find speaking in Cantonese is not enough for ordering local food. The trouble is learning to recognise the characters, especially when you need to read the menu in Cha chaang tengs. I had to get my dad or my brother to translate the menu to english while i was there.

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Paul

Mar 9, 2006

Get this, A Bangladeshi guy, whose mother tounge is Bengali, told me today that if I learnt Mandarin first it would then be easier to pick up Cantonese afterwards. Talk about making something difficult almost impossible. I asked him how would I practice Mandarin in Hong Kong while surrounded by Cantonse. Like most people who open their mouths without thinking, he just mumbled and went away.

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ABC

Mar 31, 2006

The reason Cantonese speakers tell you guys to learn Mandarin is because they (us) don’t honestly think you will be able to master sufficient Cantonese to even use it to order dishes. Cantonese is so bloody difficult, even I am surprised I speak it! Besides, Mandarin is more useful for business nowadays and you can get by speaking just English in Hong Kong. So don’t knock the fact that you are being given good advice by well-meaning people. Your blog post made it sound as if everyone was stupid with you being the only clever bloke. Cantonese is probably one of the hardest languages to learn in the world whereas Mandarin is probably one of the easier ones. The only reason you might want to learn Cantonese is if you’ve decided to LIVE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE in Hong Kong.

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Chris

Mar 31, 2006

I agree that the advice is well-meant, but the problem is that if I were to learn Mandarin I wouldn’t have much opportunity to use it, so I think it would be waste of time. People around me speak English and Cantonese, not Mandarin.
I don’t quite buy this theory about Cantonese being so much more difficult than Mandarin (for an English speaker). Believe me, if Mandarin was real easy I think I would be learning it!
I’m being realistic here – I’m lazy and don’t find it easy to learn foreign languages, so I think the limit of my ambition is to improve my Cantonese.

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Kevin Ho

Jun 30, 2006

I think its ridiculous to learn Mandarin to improve your Cantonese.
Don’t listen to these clowns advice! How on God’s earth can learning Mandarin be aiding your objective to learn Cantonese when the goal is to learn Cantonese, so learn CANTONESE. It will take you years to learn Mandarin, so by the time you actually start learning some Cantonese, you would have wasted valuable years speaking and learning Mandarin, that BASICALLY NO BODY SPEAKS IN HONG KONG! Yes, there are some mainlanders around, but why would you speak in a non-useful language when nearly the entire population speak Cantonese all day every day.
Hence, if the goal is to speak CANTONESE, YOU MUST LEARN CANTONESE – NOT MANDARIN!
Also, idiots that say Mandarin is easy are incredibly naive and stupid. Why would you learn a language because its easier? You might as well learn French as its easier still.
You cannot just go to 2 hour per week classroom lessons and pick up a language! You need endless hours of exposure, in which Cantonese is available! I read that it takes 2500 hours to speak fluent Cantonese / or Mandarin. How on earth can you get 2500 hours in Hong Kong speaking Mandarin?
I can tell you NONE OF MY FAMILY SPEAKS MANDARIN! HONG KONG is Cantonese

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Susan Lee

Apr 11, 2008

In Huangshan, Southern Anhui province in Eastern China, Fu Shou-Bing logs on to the computer in the public library near his village. Since discovering ECpod.com (http://www.ECpod.com), the retired High School Chemistry teacher has been logging on almost every day to the English-Chinese teaching website. Sometimes he cycles the 25 miles home, cooks himself a simple lunch of rice and stir-fried vegetables with salted fish, often returning once again to the library and his new hobby in the evening.
ECpod.com boasts an educational website that teaches members conversational English or Chinese (no “this is an apple” stuff here) via video clips contributed by other members. After a vetting and often transcribing process by language tutors commissioned by the site, the clips are available free of charge in YouTube fashion. The twist? Members film each other in everyday activities, hoping other members will learn not just their native tongue, but also cultural innuendos lost in textbooks and more conventional means of language learning.
“One member filmed himself cooking in his kitchen. We got a few emails asking what condiments he used,” says a bemused Warwick Hau, one of the site’s more public faces. One emailer even wanted to know if she could achieve the same Chinese stir-fry using ingredients from her regular CR Vanguard supermarket. “We often forget our every day activities may not be as mundane to people on the other side of the world,” Hau adds. Another such clip is “loaches” – a Chinese mother of 3 filmed her children and their friends playing with a bucket of loaches – slippery eel-like fish the children were picking up and gently squeezing between their fingers.
Lately the members have also begun to make cross-border friends and contacts. The ECpal function works much the same way sites like Facebook.com and MySpace.com work – members can invite each other to view their clips and make friends. And it has its fair share of juvenile humor as well. “Farting Competition” features two teenagers and graphic sound effects. Within several days, the clip was one of the most popular videos that week, likely due to mass-forwarding by the participants’ schoolmates.
For other members keen to learn more than the fact juvenile humor is similar everywhere, there are many home videos featuring unlikely little nuggets of wisdom. “The last thing I learned from the site is why you never find green caps for sale in China”, says Adam Schiedler one of the English language contributors to the site. Green caps signify cuckolded husbands, particularly shameful in China as they are a huge loss of face. Adam vows not to buy any green headgear for his newfound friends.
The subject matter of the videos often speaks volumes about its contributors. Members choose their own content and film the clip wherever they please, some of their efforts drawing attention to rural surroundings and the quaint insides of little homes otherwise not seen unless you backpack your way thru the tiny dirt roads and villages along the Chinese countryside.
Idyllic countrysides and cooking lessons aside however, ECpod marries the latest video sharing technology with the old school way of teaching a language – from the native speakers on the street. It’s a modern, more convenient alternative to spending 6 months in China. And why not let the Chinese teach you?
Visit http://www.ECPod.com

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yosef

Feb 15, 2011

Sorry to strike up an old post, but I’m curious what has come of your decision to learn cantonese? I found myself in a similar situation a few years ago while studying in HK. My university didn’t even offer a cantonese course! When I inquired I was advised to take Mandarin, which some of the exchange students did, but that seemed silly to me, as I was in a Canto speaking region, not Mandarin. Just for context, I moved to San Francisco after HK, which has a large Canto population. Sure I could now say excuse me and thanks in Cantonese, but I found they’re so unused to foreigners speaking that my bad accent was usually just ignored.
I’m not attempting to learn Mandarin, because I finally feel for the Mandarin argument, and still hope one day to learn Cantonese — I guess after becoming proficient in Mandarin.
One thing that makes me feel the argument for learning Mandarin is stronger is simply the learning material. I think there is a wealth of good learning material for Mandarin, and with the standardized pinyin system, romanization is universal across materials. Cantonese, as it is a more informal “street” language, and doesn’t have a single predominant romanization, really doesnt lend itself to being studied. And I think there simply aren’t many (any?) good learning resources for Cantonese. And the thing with English makes it equally difficult, because I found even when I did try to use Cantonese, people would just use English with me automatically, because their English is good, and it’s a big city, people don’t want to be bothered muttling thru bad language with someone if they don’t have to. Now if someone is in the less developed regions, where maybe people don’t know/use English, and you can really get a more realistic immersion with Cantonese, and have a longer time frame then a few months, then I think maybe it’s a possibility. But as other’s have suggested, it really depends on what your long term goals are. For me, I feel Mandarin does make more sense. And when I was asking locals about getting a job there, a lot of people say that speaking Mandarin will help, because of all the business with the Mainland. No one ever once suggested I should learn Cantonese…

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