places in guangdong

[hunxueer]

hi all.

i was wondering if you could give me some input to something i've been pondering. i've been living in china for about three years now--in suzhou and now in chengdu--and have made reasonable progress on my mandarin with a combination of self-study and enrollment at university. i'm now fairly disillusioned with the university studying and wishing to continue studies on my own. one of the greatest boosters to my progress was working at a job where nobody spoke english, so i was forced to speak mandarin five or six hours a day six days a week.

now i'm hoping to do the same thing with cantonese. so i'm figuring that i'll have to move to guangdong since i won't be able to find that immersion environment elsewhere. i'm also thinking that if i move to guangzhou or shenzhen it'll be all too easy to get caught up in the jaded-expats scene and end up speaking english all the time.

i'm thinking i can purchase a business visa and then move to a smaller city where there'll be fewer (or no?) expats and hopefully spend my time furthering my mandarin studies and learning cantonese. thanks to the above-mentioned job generating income shouldn't be too much of an issue, though i will have to live frugally.

there's also the issue that there are many dialects in guangdong, so i'd like to be in a place where "standard" (?) cantonese is spoken. can anybody recommend such a place, or, perhaps better, know where there might be a map online showing which regions speak which dialects?

thanks all,

hunxueer

[mrrabbit]

hi, i am from HK

If you want to go to somewhere with "standard cantonese", you may consider Guangzhou. Even though you may find expats there, most people living there spends cantonese.

You can stay away from the expats and the places that serves expats, then you can practice your cantonese.

ShenZhen is not a good place as it has a lot of workers from different places of China and Cantonese is not "standard".

[Rico_cyr]

Madarin is much more popular than Cantonese in Shenzhen, cause it is a city of incomers from all over China. Also it is a city with a history of 30 years and you can hardly experience the culture and tradition and customs that a city with a history over thousands year has.

Yes, you can choose other smaller place like Shunde(顺德), Zhongshan(中山),Foshan(佛山), dongguan(东莞). People there speak Cantonese, but the accent is slightly different from Guangzhou, Which we call it folks accents.

Guangzhou is the cradle of Cantonese and the culture, economic and political center of Canton. I think it is the best place to study Cantonese.

Also there are more job oppotunities there.