Canto-shop?

Perhaps one day I will be able to read this!

The main thing I use my Cantonese for at the moment is shopping. I guess this is such a vital part of Hong Kong culture that I should not be ashamed of this fact. It is mostly that everyone I have met socially so far has had far better English than my Cantonese, certainly for the immediate future, and so the only times I have to use Cantonese are out there in public.
I am surprised at how easy I find it to hear Cantonese. Not that I am always hearing the tones perfectly, and most certainly not replicating them perfectly, but when I am out in public I regularly hear people say the few phrases that I do know. This is in contrast to my experience in Spain where if people were speaking rapid-fire Spanish I could easily miss everything they were saying, if I wasn't concentrating really hard. The theory I'm working with at the moment, is that the tones make it easier to distinguish between each Cantonese syllable, because they often-but-not-always provide a clear marker of what is in that syllable and what is not. This means I have less of those moments where I look stupid because I can't understand what someone has said, though I have that too, though just as many moments where I look stupid because I can't work out what to say myself. Surprisingly about five minutes later I usually manage to work out something I could have said, even with my extremely limited vocabulary, and which might come in useful another time.
So it is always nice when I can say the right thing at the right time. These opportunities come at the strangest times. Yesterday I was in the supermarket, and in the process of moving my trolley to let someone through (it was very busy in there, as it often is leading up to New Year) I accidentally nudged a stack of grocery items that cascaded down with a loud clatter across most of the aisle. Needless to say, this was a deeply embarrassing moment. I spend most of my time in Hong Kong trying NOT to look out of place or uncomfortable, and here I was drawing attention to myself in a VERY busy place. Luckily this was a stack of Pringle-like chip packets, and not something really breakable or messy, so at least I had that going for me. Two of the supermarket staff rushed up to help, and I managed to say '唔好意思' (literally 'not good meaning') which is a colloquial way of saying sorry. I even heard one of them say the usual response, which is '唔緊要'(literally 'not critical') or 'never mind'. So my embarrassment was slightly improved by actually coming up with some Cantonese words appropriate to the situation. I have to say this is the first, and I hope only, time that I have ever knocked down a stack of things in a supermarket, in any country, but I was glad for the opportunity to practice some Cantonese I hadn't used in public before!
I have also been practising my writing, as well as getting my head around how to generate characters on my iPhone. Basically this relies on you knowing the stroke order, and like predictive texting, allows you to put in the first couple of strokes and then brings up a list of possible characters that you might be aiming for. I don't know the language well enough to be able to interpret this list, but I presume they are ordered either by frequency of occurrence, or perhaps some Cantonese dictionary principles. Once you have chosen a character it will also bring up a list of other characters, ones that combine with the one you chose to make other common words. All very clever. So for me to enter one of the only words I know, and the first that I learnt, 'centre', I put in a down stroke, which automatically brings up '中' as the third character, and when I select that the first extra syllable in the list is '心' making the word '中心'. So three keystrokes to bring up the word 'centre' - quicker than in English! Of course, as a gwai lo I have to know the stroke order, which will be second nature to a literate Cantonese speaker, but then I am trying to get that right anyway, and this gives me more incentive.
I also try to keep in practise with pencil and paper too, because I have long been a fan of Japanese calligraphy, and I figure if I work on my handwriting in Cantonese, that will make that all much easier when I get around to wielding a brush. So my latest practice has been learning to write enough of my address here in Tai Po, that a taxi driver could read it and get me home. In actuality I don't need to be able to do this, and I can get home okay without it, but I feel like it might be useful in an emergency, and it forced me to learn some tricky characters. I also learnt how to write Hong Kong (香港) because that seemed important too. I haven't got anyone to give me feedback on my penmanship yet, but hopefully soon.