Any Cantonese speakers in Vancouver, Canada?

[canuck]

Hi,

I'm just wondering if there are any other Vancouver members on this board. Any of you speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or both?

I'm finding that to really succeed in this city one needs to be trilingual.

Cantonese/Mandarin/English

[Cyberian]

Ever been out Vancouver's Chinatown? You only need to be monolingual.

[canuck]

Sure of course.

But as of late there are more and more Mandarin speakers.

It's nice to see them blend in, but sometimes I wonder how they communicate with each other if they don't speak the dialect, nor English.

In fact, several of my Mandarin-speaking friends actually learned Cantonese while living in Vancouver

[Gary Soup]

In Montreal we found restaurants where the servers could speak Cantonese, Mandarin, English and French.

[Harpoon]

I think that there might be more Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong immigrants here than Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese... while regular mainland Chinese are actually pretty rare. Younger generations of Cantonese speakers often know a good deal of mandarin because many are sent to Mandarin Chinese schools as children and because all the popular music comes out of Taiwan.

[canuck]

Yes there are more Cantonese-speaking Chinese than Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese. But in the past few years the number of immigrants from China have been increasing. An average 40,000 came to Canada in the past few years. Back in the late 80s and 90s, these were the same amount of numbers coming from HK. Last year less than 3,000 or so came from HK.

Harpoon, r u in Vancouver?