What do you think of my Cantonese?

[wannabeafreak]

Can someone tell me what they think of my spoken Chinese?

I haven't learnt it for a few years nor do I watch Chinese TV for a long time as I spend all my time in French. So I'm wondering if you think I sound OK, getting better, worse, or just way off.

Any feedback is welcome.

[anonymoose]

I have no idea how accurate it is, but it sounds pretty fluent.

[xiaotao]

In my opinion your Cantonese is quite good, excellent for a Chinese learner. I understand everything you said but I need to listen carefully. I would have guessed that you were a Chinese person who spoke a different dialect at home.

[Hofmann]

I understand that you're making this up on the spot instead of reading from a script or something, so one shouldn't be surprised to hear some fillers. Actually I've heard native speakers speak with more fillers, such as 即係 and 呢, which irritates me. Your pronunciation is acceptable. I can understand almost all of what you say and that which I don't understand is probably due to my own small vocabulary. All mistakes regarding pronunciation were tone related. I don't remember any grammar mistakes.

About what you were talking about, I think your approach to learning languages resembles how babies learn their first language. I agree that one doesn't have to formally learn grammar in order to speak well, but I think learning grammar formally should help just as English speakers who have formally studied grammar in school have improved language skills. If I were to give you suggestions, I would recommend that if you don't usually write anything, write some short compositions, about the length of a good Wikipedia article. (Editing Wikipedia is a good place to do that.) This will give you practice using a register that is suitable for an encyclopedia. This adds literate features into your speech. Literate features include more topic-centered language (as opposed to people-centered), more compact grammar and lexical density, less redundancy, and more cohesion. Of course orate features are valuable as well, but literate features I find lacking.

[wannabeafreak]

Crap... I heard myself say around 3 tone mistakes including "enter the room", "fridge" etc. I can hear my mistakes after I listen but I didn't want to re-do the video just for the sake of looking good, as I probably would make mistakes all the time in real life.

Actually, I'm quite out of practice. I didn't bother to improve nor to find anyone to help me fix up my mistakes. Simply my job and French take most of my time and no time to work on improving Cantonese for a long time.

I guess I need to listen to 30 mins of Cantonese radio per day too. Actually, I could have spoken this video with tons of idioms, slang and swear words to make myself look cool, but chose to speak the way I normally do it in daily life.