你的功夫是很好!

[Vetch]

你的功夫是很好!

I hope the above means "Your Kung fu is very good!" in Mandarin, coz that's what a kind person on YouTube told me (and I have no reason to doubt them).

Kind person also told me the Mandarin was pronounced thusly: "Ni3 de gong1 fu1 shi4 hen3 hao3!"

What I need now is the same in Cantonese, both writing (might be the same?) and pronunciation.

Thanks a lot in advance!

[renzhe]

You should drop the 是, Chinese adjectives do not need it. Although gong1fu1 is not really wrong, gong1fu is more common, and more correct according to the Mainland standard. Was this written by a native speaker?

Written vernacular Chinese is usually used for writing things down, and it closely follows Standard Mandarin vocabulary and grammar (and also the other way around, as modern Standard Mandarin was based on the written canon). What you wrote will be read without any problems by any Cantonese speaker, though they will pronounce it according to the Cantonese pronunciation. Cantonese and Mandarin (and most other Chinese dialects) use the same characters, but pronounce them differently.

It is also possible to use Chinese characters to write Cantonese -- using typically Cantonese vocabulary and grammar, but this is less common, and typically used for less formal writing. I can't help you with it, as I don't know any Cantonese. If you want to SAY the phrase in Cantonese, then you will need the Cantonese phrase, otherwise what you wrote (but without 是) will be understood by Cantonese speakers.

[Vetch]

Thank you very much for the info!

I have no Chinese at all, so help me out here:

What does 是 mean at all?

Dropping it in the written sentence is no problem, but what do I say? "Ni3 de gong1fu hen3 hao3"? (I just counted characters and syllables.)

I think the YouTube person is a native Mandarin speaker, but I don't know really.

And I still would love to know how to say (and to write) the same in Cantonese.

(In case s/o wonders why: I have been watching too many old Hong Kong movies lately. )

[renzhe]

是 means "to be" (see the explanation here), and you would use it to connect a subject to a noun, e.g. 你是美国人 (you are an American).

You do not use it to connect the subject to an adjective in standard Mandarin, though, since the adjectives do not need it. So you would indeed write 你的功夫很好. Keep in mind that hen3 is pronounced like hen2 due to tone sandhi. However, it should still be written as hen3, like you did.

I don't know why the person on youtube used 是. It's possible that he/she is a native speaker of a different dialect and speaks Mandarin as a second language, and that he/she made a mistake.

I'll let someone else help you with Cantonese, but you should know that even the Hong Kong movies are typically subtitled in Mandarin (using traditional characters), and not using written Cantonese. Also, many of the old Shaw Brothers movies were released in Mandarin, which was in vogue in the 60s and 70s, as far as I've heard.

[skylee]

IMO, "shi" is not required in this sentence. With "shi" in the sentence, I would expect that it is followed by a "but ...", like "but your dancing is not as good" or "but you are illiterate", etc.

I think you can also drop "de" if it is in a conversation.

In Cantonese (please note that it has more tones than Mandarin and the tones are different) it is 你嘅功夫好好, expressed in Jyutping it is "Nei5 ge3 gung1 fu1 hou2 hou2".

[Vetch]

Ohh, thank you, both of you!

Dear rhenze, I really have no Chinese at all, as in ZERO, nada, nix. So all information is new to me and very much appreciated. (Only thing I knew before I posted here was that there are different tones and how they are represented by numbers, thanks to a webside called "Learn Cantonese".)

And as for the movies: I never watch them with Mandarin subs. That would be entirely futile in my case, and the DVDs I get in the stores don't offer them anyway. I watch them with English or German subs.

And yes, some are Mandarin (at the moment I am watching mostly Golden Harvest stuff from the early 80ies though), and I am really proud that I can distinguish Mandarin from Cantonese, even though I can't understand a word.

(Don't laugh at me X) )

I have just checked the kind YouTube person's channel, and it seems s/he is from Japan. So there.

( http://www.youtube.com/user/DFCcaptain3 )

Dear skylee, now I will lock myself in and practice pronunciation. Unfortunately I know no Chinese person to demonstrate to me how it should be done. Luckily there also is no Chinese person here to laugh when I try it.

Thanks again!

[Hofmann]

At the character dictionary at MDBG there are links to audio files of many syllables, which you can hear if you click on the romanization.

[creamyhorror]

I have just checked the kind YouTube person's channel, and it seems s/he is from Japan. So there.

( http://www.youtube.c...ser/DFCcaptain3 )

That guy is just using a machine translator to get his Chinese translations. Two samples of his Chinese:

男兒當自強在官話之內同拼音并漢字抒情詩。

約莫杰黃飛鴻。

編輯由DFCcaptain3。

---

《站起來》與拼音詞組

唱歌由成龍，王力宏，孫燕姿，和韩红

編輯由DFCcaptain3

---

For example, his sentence "男兒當自強在官話之內同拼音并漢字抒情詩。" is basically a word-for-word transliteration from English:

男兒當自強 = Nan Er Dang Zi Qiang

在官話之內 = in Mandarin (old term for it)

同 = with

拼音 = pinyin

并 = and

漢字 = hanzi

抒情詩 = lyrics (mistranslated)

The sentence is not proper or natural Chinese, or course. The guy himself appears to be Dutch.

[Vetch]

Haha! BabelfishPower! X)

The Kung fu sentence I got wasn't too bad, then. But good that I checked with you folks here!

Thanks a lot, Hofman, for the link! I will use that site, though I doubt that it will help me much with getting a decent pronunciation.

But as I said, no one near me to complain...

(And I just feel the need to mention: No, I DO NOT sing Chinese karaoke! X) )

[Vetch]

Oh, another question:

你嘅功夫好好 — does the double 好 make it "very good" instead of just "good"?

And... erm, 你嘅, what exactly does that mean? "Your" said in two words?

(I'm a bit unsure if those questions are proper to ask, they might be too stupid, but I figure asking does no harm after all. )

[renzhe]

In the Mandarin sentence, 的 is a particle which turns "you" (你) into "your".

I imagine that 你嘅 is the same thing, only in Cantonese.

[Vetch]

I trust you are right.

Danke.