0703212100 We live where?

We have four months today. My dear wife, who is, a matter of fact, not just my biased personal opinion, a world class teacher, called me at 11:00 to say we have exactly four months to go.

I had my weekly Cantonese lesson and it was going well until I had to remember the word for “New Zealand”. My mind went blank and the class was looking at me. I would be better off not learning any Cantonese and pretending to be deaf. I keep saying things like: “You can hear I’m Cantonese” and “You can’t hear, I’m not me”. The Cantonese teacher, Ma Tai Tai, says to not be offended when the locals laugh at me, it will not be because they think I am stupid, they will laugh because I will be saying something funny.

I bought a Cantonese phrase book to help – I would recommend that if anyone wants to learn Cantonese, they should get a language course with a tape or CD. The way that the language books write the words phonetically is like learning a second language so that you can learn a third. There are a multitude of ways that the various companies try to use symbols to indicate the correct tones. They use phonetic romanised Cantonese, but they are different for each publisher. There are also variations depending on the target audience – one book has examples for ‘young people’ that are saying completely different things.

A language book by itself is useless without a recording of how to say the words in the right tones. Cantonese uses sounds that do not naturally occur in English.

Cantonese has the same word for ‘Australia’ and ‘Beer’. To the Cantonese speaking Chinese people, Australia is ‘Beer land”.