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Whitefella Australian learning how to be gwai lo (鬼佬) in Hong Kong

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Baby steps in Cantonese

 The moment has finally arrived where I must stop playing at learning Cantonese and actually practice it. Like most adult language learners, this is the scary part, because I have to risk appearing incompetent, foolish, or even offensive, if I choose the wrong word or the wrong tone.
I have forced myself to get right into it straightaway, despite my limited vocabulary. I have had a few small successes, managing to ask where the railway station is (火車站在哪裡), and directing taxis to two different places. I was less successful at the vegetable market, thinking the grapes were 11(十一) dollars rather than 51(五十一), though to my ears the five at the start of fifty one is easy to miss.
Today I may have even been complimented on my Cantonese ability, though if that was what she said, the woman at the store at Tai Po market was being very generous indeed. All I said was 'I think I want'(我想要)[notice I couldn't even remember how to say 'this'] , and then, 'thanks for that'(). Perhaps she wanted to be encouraging, because most gwai lo are so hopeless. I'd like to think that perhaps I hadn't mangled her language quite as badly as most, but how would I know?!? I need more feedback. Once I am on top of the basic household stuff here, I will have to search out some Cantonese lessons.
The competence thing is an interesting one - for me it is a bit like trying to learn to ride a horse. If I have had a couple of successful language encounters (ie. I understood something, or someone seemed to understand me) then I feel more confident, and will probably try some more. If I fall off that horse, though, and feel like I have completely frozen up, or said the wrong thing, then it is that much harder to try and use Cantonese the next time. My strategy at the moment has been to browbeat myself quietly into trying again, so I don't retreat into my usual silent gesturing or mute looks of incomprehension.
While I'm on the subject of language, I did find this nice little piece about the difference between the two sorts of thank-you in Cantonese. I have been paying a lot of attention to this particular nuance, but in no way think I have it sorted yet.
On the more fun side, I spend my time out and about trying to find the few characters I know on signs and in advertisements and things. The MTR is a great place for this, because these usually come with English translations! At the moment I think I know about twenty characters, and even some of these I may be getting confused with similar ones. As I'll need to know a few thousand to be considered literate, I have a long way to go... I was excited to discover the idea of 'radicals' (or whatever the linguists are calling them now) - the smaller sub-elements of each character. These are very handy to know, as they may give you a small clue as to what the word means. One of the first examples I have collected is Kong(港), as in Hong Kong (usually translated as Fragrant Harbour). Notice the three small strokes down the left-hand side of the character? These are the radical for water, something that most harbours tend to contain. How can you not love that? Since then I have been watching out for the radicals for person, for fire, and for hand, but I am seeing lots of others that I recognise as having seen in other different characters, but I still don't know what they mean. Part of my difficulty there is finding a Chinese dictionary I can understand. Google Translate seems okay like that, though it gives the sound in Putonghua, which is pretty useless for me trying to learn Cantonese. Still, I'm sure the truth is out there...

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