keywords cantonese english jm9 uk racism british racists 梨香別井 miss_pear_and_her_peers

莫名其妙 mok6 ming4 kei4 miu6 "puzzling, baffling"

Btw, her username 梨香別井 is a play on the Cantonese idiom 離鄉別井 lei4 hoeng1 bit6 zeng2 "to move away from one's hometown or motherland and move somewhere else"

I wonder if it’s intentional.

Art by @PokeNerb #114

The artist explains in the caption of her post here. I believe the comic is an early version where she collects and tries to articulate her feelings.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Db_Oiv6iaRS

Guangzhou's mayor has officially committed to protecting the Cantonese language, identifying it as a vital component of the region's cultural heritage in a government work report

https://www.thestandard.com.hk/china-news/article/322131/

The report stressed the importance of preserving Cantonese as the "living carrier of Guangfu culture." This initiative is part of a larger effort to enhance the city's status as a national historical and cultural center, which includes promoting traditional arts like Cantonese opera.

The government aims to use the broader Lingnan culture as a significant link for overseas Chinese to strengthen their connection to their cultural identity.

Literally me at Australian Dairy Co 😅 they also told me to hurry up

It's not perfect but hey, neither are the other languages

While it is not perfect and some phrases seem awkward, I did use about 80% of the more common phrases in this card when asking local something 😃… the trip was awesome btw

Well! Cantonese is spoken by 60 million people, which is similar to the entire Italian population. The language itself is also important and inseparable to our Hong Kong culture! Think of the food, Chau Siu Bao and Siu Mai. Think of the Cantonese hits, Stephen Chow's comedy (Yah, I know he has deflected. What a shame!) and many of our cool swear words! We have our own proud culture and perspective which can only be expressed in Cantonese. I am sure many people, whether they are expats or travellers in Hong Kong want to get immersed in our culture and learn our language but find it difficult and too much effort to find materials.

We have seen Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and even a fictional language, Klingon are available on Duolingo(NO offence to people who are speaking or learning the language). While governments don't support smaller languages, Duolingo has provided a platform for those who want to start learning a new language. It is also one of the most popular sites and apps for language learners! For me, I like how Duolingo helped me to pick up Japanese and German. I am sure there are many people out there who loves Hong Kong, who wants to know more about our beautiful city and who wants to go deep into our culture by learning our language. Clearly, we need Cantonese available on Duolingo so potential learners can find it easy to start learning our language!

Therefore, I am here to invite you to contribute to Cantonese learning on Duolingo. If you are interested in this idea, please go to https://incubator.duolingo.com to request contributing to a Cantonese course!

Here are the flows:

1. Click 'Contribute to a Course'.

2. Choose 'Enter Other' and type 'Hong Kong Cantonese' or 'Cantonese'.

3. Type the reasons for contributing to building the course

4. Enter your email. And all we have to do is wait for responses from Duolingo!

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Here are some reasons for learning Cantonese for your references in section 3.

1. Cantonese is spoken by 60 million people, which is similar to the entire population of Italy.

2. To get a full travel experience by talking to locals and navigate around the city easier.

3. Learning Cantonese is essential to supplement with English if you want to go deep into Hong Kong culture.

4. Simply a cool language to learn! And you can watch Hong Kong films without looking at subtitles!

There are still thousands of reasons to learn Cantonese and I am sure you are smart enough to figure it out! As a Hongkongers, I am sure we share the same passion of preserving our own culture. I am confident it will happen if we all do something about it!

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HK Canto vocabulary

Kai 仔 (he uses this word near at the end of the video).

L short for 撚 lan2 "dick/penis/fuck". 含撚 ham4 lan2 suck my dick/fuck off

HK sayings

好仔唔當差 hou2 zai2 m4 dong1 caai1 "good boys don't become cops".

when you are a young person, and/or look shabby, and/or dress in black, and/or racially targeted, you get picked out for a "random" an on-the-spot id check and possible bag/pocket search by police in HK.

種族歸納 zung2 zuk6 gwai1 naap6 is the main formal/academic chinese word used to describe "racial profiling". 歸納 "conclusion/induce from a set of facts"

Hi all, I’m a hispanic, fluent speaker of Cantonese. My partner’s family is from Zhongshan, very close to HK and Macau, and I have studied the language for around 8 years at this point. I learned it because it was the lingua franca of the city and basically required for daily life. I last visited 3 years ago and noticed very few kids could speak it, as a consequence or govt policy and migration, but it was still very much the day to day language used by adults everywhere here unless you went to a bank or govt office.

I came back this summer, and it’s a totally different world. I’ll detail exactly what happened but the language is practically dead here when it used to be the primary form of communication just 3 years ago. I basically need to use google translate in a place where it was unthinkable not long ago.

The main thing that changed is that Mandarin is now the assumed default everywhere for basic, low stakes interactions. When you enter a shop or interact with a market vendor, everything is in Mandarin, even if both speakers are local Cantonese natives. They claim the reason if they don’t want to inconvenience others in case they might be from outside regions and don’t know how to speak the language, and even my partner believes it. I ran a social experiment where I would exclusively speak Cantonese and here’s what happened.

Low skill workers / shopkeepers / vendors

All of them Mandarin speaking only unless above age of 40. Above 40, usually only one person in the shop can understand Cantonese but cannot actively speak it. Fruit vendors, convenience store cashiers, street cleaners, all Mandarin. These were 100% Cantonese speaking in 2023.

Any new malls, buildings, modern shops

All Mandarin. No kids speak it, no adults speak it. Only 1 or 2 out of 20 can understand it.

Old town markets and restaurants

Older ladies serving dim sum can speak it 50% of the time. Shocking to be in a dim sum restaurant hearing Cantonese music and you have to try hard to find anyone who speaks it among the staff.

The remaining speakers are left hidden within crowds, within older clientele of restaurants. It’s completely dead among anyone young.

Playgrounds

We met a lot of elderly grandparents, taking their grandchildren to playgrounds around the area. However, we noticed none of the children were replying to the grandparents in Cantonese even if the grandparents were 100% Cantonese speakers when I brought this up, they mentioned that it’s because their schools are in Mandarin and there’s no way to fix it. I told him that it’s really important to preserve Cantonese and they agree but they said there’s nothing they can do. This was shocking to me because the easy solution is to simply speak to the kids in Cantonese and tell them you don’t understand when they speak to you in Mandarin that way it forces the kids to actively produce it however, it seems none of the kids can say even a single word.

Conclusion

Overall, I felt a big sense of entitlement from people to force me to speak Mandarin even though we’re in the Guangdong region of China. Even Cantonese speaking folks would tell me wow you don’t know how to speak Mandarin in a sneering way and had no response when I said, isn’t this Guangdong? it’s completely reversed. Language change is non-linear and happens very fast, especially when the low stakes social interaction conversations are all in the new language. Workers have no incentive at all to learn and kids have no desire to even enunciate a single word. Only HK will preserve Cantonese.

堤岸 Chợ Lớn in HCMC (Saigon), Vietnam

video by YangYang_vn

Cho Lon City was a historic city, a center of commerce, located right next door to Saigon. Cho Lon and Saigon were merged together as Saigon-Cholon during French colonialism. After independence, the name of the city was simplified to Saigon. Today, Cho Lon is a busy area within Ho Chi Min City (Saigon).

more about the Cantonese in Cho Lon https://vietcetera.com/en/a-walk-through-the-history-of-cho-lon-chinatown.

detailed history of Vietnamese Chinese (Hoa) and Cho Lon https://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/70453?lang=en