breaking through

I'm constantly amazed by the ease with which you can break through a myriad of fears and prejudices just by uttering a few words in the local dialect. I've spent the past few days in one of the more remote suburbs of Hong Kong starting my study of Cantonese, and today was a great reminder of why it's worth making the effort. There's an old guy smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer at the tram stop, and as I go to stand next to him he moves away, obviously a little frightened of what might happen if the strange white person starts talking to him. That is of course until the strange white person turns to him and with a big smile asks: "Bei-zao hou-yum-ah?" ("Does the beer taste good?" in Cantonese). Right now I only know about 20 words in Cantonese, but those three are good enough to start a friendship. Wonderful, wonderful.

waiting for godot

Life in little bit of limbo at the moment as I have just returned to Hong Kong but not started working yet, and I am still trying to fix a date with my ex-colleague to deliver on the Mandarin bet running with my former boss. Patience darling, patience. (Yulin, 如果您把这条消息看到了,请您给我打电话!)

So, in the meantime, I figured I may as well start learning cantonese (the dialect of Chinese that the locals in Hong Kong speak). 343 days from today will be February 1st 2006, so that sounds like as good a time as any to be fluent in Cantonese by, let's see how we go.

The best / most frequent excuse heard in Hong Kong for not learning Cantonese is that because it has seven, yes seven, tones, it is just SOOO much harder than Mandarin and therefore very difficult for foreigners to learn. Well, here's a piece of news for everybody. Three of the tones are just differences in pitch. And there is no right or wrong pitch, it's all just relative based on your own voice. To take an example from Chris, author of The Third Ear, if you can pronounce the English word "really" in more than one pitch (which you can, the first when you use it to ask a question "really?" and the second when you use it to confirm the answer "really."), then you already have a handle on part of this whole "because it's tonal it's very hard for foreigners to learn" cantonese thing! Anyway, that's part of the mysterious seven tones thing, surely the rest can't be that hard.

ngoh sek-tan yat-di gwang-dong-wa!
(i can understand a little cantonese)