0703142200 These are a foo of my favorite things

I finally started my Cantonese course at UQ.
Lesson one – choir practice. The Cantonese language, sorry dialect, can be described as a language made by singing. We studied two words for two hours – foo and fun. There are five tones and when the whole class practice a word together, it sounds like a Chinese version of the Sound of Music.

Fooo - a fear, a fear of frogs,
Fooooo - some trousers full of legs.
Foo - some wine that turns you red
Fooor - the flat spot on your head.

And so on.

The language has a logical word order that makes sense when it is explained from the Chinese perspective. There are no plurals.
For example if you have, say, a car, then it should always be called a car. If you have two cars then why should the name of the first thing change from car to cars because the same thing is next to it, or even more confusing, if you happen to be the legal owner of more than one and even the other one is not in sight. You would tell someone that you have "cars". To the Chinese way of thinking, this is like changing the name of your first child when you have your second. Things are always called the same name.

Even though there is no alphabet, they have 19 sounds that make the language. English has 40 sounds (some say 41).

There are 12 of us in the class and all are learning Cantonese due to a wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, girlfriend or lover. One has a Vietnamese husband and would like to speak to her inlaws in their language, another has met a girl in Hong Kong and another boy would really like to.

I have a friend at work who went to China for work, met a girl, fell in love, returned broken hearted to Australia and then dyed his hair black before returning to China to meet her parents. He learned Mandarin, the official Chinese language, and is of the opinion that Cantonese sounds like chooks squabbling. His reasoning is that Mandarin is "better" because it has nine tones, while Cantonese has only 5. Why he finds this important may become clear to me later, but for now five ways of saying “foo” is enough of a challenge.

For all the fuss the Cantonese language makes over the tones, it is remarkably tolerant of what letters are used. The letters “L” and “N” seem to be interchangeable. I was learning from some tourist tapes and learned the phrase “how about you” (Nay ne) – then our Cantonese instructor, Ma Tai Tai, pronounced it as “Lay Lee” and said this was acceptable. At this stage I really didn’t believe that I was getting my moneys worth from this. After comparing notes to the Lonely Planet Guide I found that Ma Tai Tai is correct. In a convoluted way, I was sure that the problem was caused by Ma Tai Tai having a Chinese accent while she was saying the Cantonese words while speaking English. If I know what I mean…