ABC Cantonese speaker starting out with Mandarin class?

[Pandekage]

Hi all, first post on here!

 

Anyway, my background: I'm an ABC, and while I do speak Cantonese (thanks to my parents) my idiot 8 year old self gave up on formal training and as a result cannot comprehend formal speech (i.e. news or business) and cannot read or write at all. I'm now a 25 year old grad student, and am looking at taking my uni's introductory Mandarin course (no Cantonese). Would my oral Cantonese be of an advantage here, or are the two systems too different? Any suggestions on how I could take advantage of this Mandarin course to also concurrently develop my Cantonese? Would appreciate if anyone who've been in my shoes could give their voice   

[Lu]

31 minutes ago, Pandekage said:

Would my oral Cantonese be of an advantage here, or are the two systems too different?

I haven't been in your shoes, but I have had classmates who were. Your Cantonese will be of some advantage, but you'll possibly not really notice it because you'll still have to study hard.

 

Cantonese is different from Mandarin, more so than Spanish from Italian. Cantonese and Mandarin are clearly related and are the same in all kinds of aspects, but they're different enough that they are mutually unintelligble (as you might already have noticed). Even if they use the same word for things, the pronunciation is often totally different. Grammar is similar, but not the same. Both are tonal languages, but they don't have exactly the same tones.

 

So like your classmates who don't speak any Chinese language, you'll have to drill tones and pronunciation, learn vocabulary, practice grammar, and write characters.

 

Your advantage will be that you are familiar with tones and what they do: you can hear them and pronounce them, the concept is familiar. You're familiar with the grammar: Cantonese grammar is fairly close to Mandarin grammar, and both are very (very) different from the grammar of most European languages. Vocab learning will soon be relatively easy: many words are essentially the same as in Cantonese, while they will be a completely random collection of sounds for many of your classmates.

 

But unless you've learned a completely unfamiliar language before (Xhosa or Arabic or whatever), you might not notice how it's easier and just find it still pretty hard.

 

Good luck, and don't hesitate to come back here if you have questions!

[snowflake]

It may depend on what Mandarin level you’d like to achieve.  I’m an ABC with Cantonese parents. I’ve met native Cantonese speakers who leveraged that language though going past a certain Mandarin level seems to be difficult. I have two Hong Kong born and raised friends who started learning Mandarin during their university years.  While they had the advantage of already knowing the characters, they both found learning Mandarin to be very difficult, bitterly so.  One attended university in Taiwan and talks with great frustration about writing papers that her professors did not understand.  Both these people ended up learning Mandarin to an advance level and are separately married to Taiwanese. Another native Cantonese friend from the mainland who has been studying Mandarin for 10 + years expresses frustration that she still occasionally makes tone mistakes. 

 

I’ve encountered some Cantonese who know Mandarin and can function reasonably well in it though have what sometimes appears to be overconfidence with their knowledge of the language.  For instance, they will correct my Mandarin use of 星期 for week, saying to instead use 礼拜. 

 

Anyhow, good luck!

[Flickserve]

13 hours ago, Pandekage said:

my idiot 8 year old self gave up on formal training and as a result cannot comprehend formal speech (i.e. news or business)

 

It's ok, there are people in a far worse position.

 

13 hours ago, Pandekage said:

Would my oral Cantonese be of an advantage here, or are the two systems too different?

 

A slight advantage in that you pick up the logic of the sentences far more quickly even though spoken Mandarin has some differences to spoken Cantonese. The trouble is remembering....

 

13 hours ago, Pandekage said:

Any suggestions on how I could take advantage of this Mandarin course to also concurrently develop my Cantonese?

 

Look up the Cantonese equivalent word. If you pay for pleco, you can listen to the Cantonese word. If you keep listening to Cantonese, you will eventually recognise this words when listening.

 

 

Probably, your biggest frustrations will be comprehending the language structure making you feel that you should and ought to be doing much better - the thought in your brain to expressing it verbally seems very, very close yet you cannot control your mouth. Thus, you still need to put a lot of hours in and not be complacent. 

 

 

My other advice would be to work on listening skills a lot. In this way, you can pick up the characteristics of Mandarin and then slowly try to incorporate them into your own speech. The rhythm of Mandarin has differences to Cantonese which will affect your accent. But it depends how good an accent you want. Do you want to sound mostly like an American speaking Mandarin? Then native speakers in China may not understand you. Do you mind sounding like a Cantonese speaker speaking Mandarin? In that situation, many many native speakers will understand your imperfections. 

[Flickserve]

12 hours ago, Lu said:

you'll still have to study hard.

 

Absolutely.

 

12 hours ago, Lu said:

 

So like your classmates who don't speak any Chinese language, you'll have to drill tones and pronunciation, learn vocabulary, practice grammar, and write characters

 

Absolutely.

 

2 hours ago, snowflake said:

One attended university in Taiwan and talks with great frustration about writing papers that her professors did not understand. 

 

I find that HK Cantonese speakers have far more advanced listening skills in Mandarin than overseas born Chinese. But this situation is a case of writing skills. If I ask a native speaker of English to write a research proposal and a journal paper, more than 99.9% cannot do so. Writing a paper is an acquired skill.

 

2 hours ago, snowflake said:

Another native Cantonese friend from the mainland who has been studying Mandarin for 10 + years expresses frustration that she still occasionally makes tone mistakes

 

Very few second language learners are totally perfect. 

 

2 hours ago, snowflake said:

For instance, they will correct my Mandarin use of 星期 for week, saying to instead use 礼拜. 

 

Ugh . They might be trying to tease you. LOL.

However, there is some crossover of Cantonese terms into Mandarin equivalent. And Guangdong speakers of Cantonese use more Mandarin equivalent words in their Cantonese. I.e. Not so colloquial when compared to HK speakers.

[snowflake]

My Cantonese acquaintances wouldn't dare kid me about Mandarin corrections.  The person who had problems writing papers at the Taiwan university did well on her papers when in Hong Kong.  My point to Pandekage is to not necessarily count on leveraging his Cantonese, and as has been pointed out, he/she will still have to study very hard. 

 

Learning Mandarin may change the dynamics with his/her parents and the local Cantonese speaking community.

[Flickserve]

9 hours ago, snowflake said:

The person who had problems writing papers at the Taiwan university did well on her papers when in Hong Kong.

 

I think there are still style differences and academics vary from one to another.

 

9 hours ago, snowflake said:

Learning Mandarin may change the dynamics with his/her parents and the local Cantonese speaking community.

 

Could you elaborate more? I haven't had any issues. I can use Mandarin in a fairly simple intermediate level and have some light discussions though far from what I would regard as fluency.

 

I rather older than the OP but all I have received from the local HK community is some grudging respect for taking on the arduous process of learning the language starting from practically a zero level of Chinese, first with Cantonese and then many years later with Mandarin. To clarify, I am a heritage speaker though at a level far lower than the OP when I first started working in HK.

[陳德聰]

I live and work in a Cantonese speaking community (Chinatown) that is rapidly being gentrified at the same time as having an influx of Mandarin speakers and I can attest, being a Mandarin speaker with Cantonese affiliations is sometimes awkward. Reactions range from disdain to reverence and then disappointment when my Mandarin is better than how people expect my Cantonese ought to be.

[Zbigniew]

31 minutes ago, 陳德聰 said:

Reactions range from disdain

I can identify with this. I know quite a few Mandarin speakers who came to the UK around the turn of the millennium, when there were relatively few Mandarin speakers in my city. Almost inevitably, some of them got jobs in the largely Cantonese speaking Chinese community. I remember two of them, who worked part time in probably the most successful Chinese restaurant here, telling me once how they were waiting on some very wealthy Hong Kong people and they kept getting scolded by these HKers because they couldn't consistently grasp what was being said to them in Cantonese. The matriarch in the group of diners actually tried to publicly humiliate them, saying "You call yourselves Chinese, and yet you can't even speak the language!"

 

Cantonese speakers are in the minority here now, and it's unlikely they'd get away so easily with disdain of this kind.

[snowflake]

To 陳德聰 and Zbigniew, the native Mandarin speakers who detect that I have a Cantonese accent generally are those who have lived in Guangdong for a long period and grew up somewhere else, have a Cantonese spouse, etc.  In other words, my Cantonese accent is very slight; It is extremely rare that a native Mandarin speaker notices it.

[snowflake]

To Flickserve, this is a somewhat complicated subject.  Below is something I originally wrote for a different question on another forum which overlaps with your question.   BTW, I live in the US and am Toishanese.

 

I am in my late 50’s so my thoughts on this have changed over the years. My parents are from the generation who left the mainland before 1949. Interestingly when mentioning that, Taiwanese seem to immediately warm up to me. I took Mandarin in college for my language requirement and back then my mother was encouraging. Mandarin is difficult for me so after taking it, I quickly forgot it. My parents, parental relatives, and their friends consider speaking Chinese to be paramount to Chinese identity so growing up and into adulthood, my Toishanese or lack of was prodded, criticized, and the like. My husband and I both have a decent amount of non-fond memories of our respective local Chinese (Toishanese and Cantonese) communities. After establishing my life as an adult, my ties to the local Chinese community became for practical purposes next to non-existent. Encountering native Cantonese or Toishanese speakers generally meant being grilled about my familial background and my Chinese skills. It also meant a good amount of attitude about why I did not “hang out” with Chinese or other east Asians. This sort of thing would happen with co-workers from Hong Kong or SE Asia. 

About 8-10 years ago I visited a cousin in Hong Kong which started me on learning Mandarin this time around. The local Chinese community here now is different due to the immigration shifts. There are many more Mandarin speakers than Cantonese. The groups of Mandarin speakers that I come into contact with here are more well educated than the Cantonese and they generally do not mix much. There are cultural differences and at times tension. Besides culturally, the tension can be explained politically and myriad other ways. These days I identify myself as American because of my American sentiments. In Taiwan last summer, when I said that I’m American either the reaction was weird looks or asking if I’m 華裔. When I talk to native Mandarin speakers here in the US, they generally light up upon discovering that I’m American born. I think that echoes their hopes for their children. Mandarin speakers become even warmer when they learn that my parents are from Guangdong which I believe reflects the tension between Mandarin and Cantonese. The dynamics of speaking Mandarin to native Cantonese (older people) are different. I was in California (huge Asian population) at an elder care facility for Chinese when one of the residents asked me in Toishanese whether I spoke any Chinese. I had been speaking only English since my Toishanese is non-existent. I replied to her in Mandarin. She lit up and responded in Mandarin… how do you know Mandarin? Are you from Beijing? She became quieter upon learning that I’m American born and that my parents are Toishanese. 

I’m no longer hassled about my Chinese skills. A sad thing is that only stopped within the past 10 or so years. The Cantonese and Toishanese speakers stopped when they realized that I can speak Mandarin. The native Mandarin speakers who unintentionally disparaged my Mandarin progress stopped when they learned that I can read. My trips to Taiwan also seems to influence people’s perceptions about me (did not do the tourist thing). 

[Flickserve]

14 hours ago, Zbigniew said:

The matriarch in the group of diners actually tried to publicly humiliate them, saying "You call yourselves Chinese, and yet you can't even speak the language!"

 

I used to get this from some work colleagues when I first came to HK and not being able to speak Cantonese. This was just before 97. It was fairly easy to reply though. I would first confirm the speaker regards themselves as Chinese (of course the answer was yes), then I would say "a Chinese person should be able to speak the national language of China....so....how good is your putonghua?" And you know that generation of HKers had no education in putonghua. I guess it wasn't nice to use that but you know, years of public criticism by native HK cantonese speakers does make one quite defensive.

 

14 hours ago, Zbigniew said:

Cantonese speakers are in the minority here now, and it's unlikely they'd get away so easily with disdain of this kind.

 

Agree, the dynamics changed so quickly.

 

8 hours ago, snowflake said:

It also meant a good amount of attitude about why I did not “hang out” with Chinese or other east Asians. This sort of thing would happen with co-workers from Hong Kong or SE Asia. 

 

i am a bit younger but in England it was slightly different. I could not match the same social wavelength as the HK or few Taiwanese students at University. The Malaysians were OK as many spoke hokkien and no mandarin. But it was only when I fell into a group of British Chinese when things started changing.

 

8 hours ago, snowflake said:

The groups of Mandarin speakers that I come into contact with here are more well educated than the Cantonese and they generally do not mix much

 

Yes. I haven't had much issue with Mandarin speakers and my lack of Mandarin when communicating with them in HK - perhaps it helps that the baseline mandarin level of the indigenous population around me is quite low. . but it sometimes bugs me how badly some colleagues speak Mandarin. I was evesdropping on my colleague giving some instructions to a Mandarin speaker who indicated comprehension. I asked my colleague what he said - to me it sounded nothing like Mandarin. I just wonder how the heck the other person understood or were they just nodding to be polite....

 

8 hours ago, snowflake said:

In Taiwan last summer, when I said that I’m American

 

Out of curiosity, how do you express this in Chinese? 我是美国人？我在美国出生？

[snowflake]

Flickserve,

If I didn't already know that you are an established member of the forum then I'd wonder if you might be a troll.  It seems odd asking about things I've mentioned and yet having your own stories for those. 

 

The quote function isn't working for me at the moment but you asked, "Out of curiosity, how do you express this in Chinese? 我是美国人？我在美国出生？" 

Since I suspect that you've been studying Mandarin longer than me, am a bit unsure why this request for my phraseology is being made. 

我是美国人。 

我在美国出生的 还有长大的。

我的父母是广东人。 

I emphasize being American in these types of exchanges.  I consider my Mandarin to be so-so but it's decent enough that during this years' overseas trip, Taiwanese generally assumed that I am also Taiwanese.

[Flickserve]

On 21/09/2017 at 12:28 AM, snowflake said:

It seems odd asking about things I've mentioned and yet having your own stories for those. 

 

It's just that the experience is different. I find it interesting that overseas Chinese have such very different experiences and like to look at reasons for that.

 

 

On 21/09/2017 at 12:28 AM, snowflake said:

Since I suspect that you've been studying Mandarin longer than me, am a bit unsure why this request for my phraseology is being made. 

我是美国人。 

我在美国出生的 还有长大的。

我的父母是广东人。 

 

To clarify, if I say  我是英国人，I get a look of confusion from the recipients until clarifying. So the wording used is important. But that's just the same in any language when anybody has assumptions. My appearance is totally Chinese so all my life everybody assumes I am from China or HK (or sometimes Japanese). In the end, I have given up using 我是英国人 as a starter sentence.

[stapler]

Interesting thread. 

 

Does the pressure to speak Chinese from friends, family, coworkers etc translate into them trying harder to speak Chinese with you? Could be a bonus right? "Yes I'm a really bad Chinese person please speak to me more to help me improve".

[snowflake]

2 hours ago, Flickserve said:

To clarify, if I say  我是英国人，I get a look of confusion from the recipients until clarifying. So the wording used is important. But that's just the same in any language when anybody has assumptions. My appearance is totally Chinese so all my life everybody assumes I am from China or HK (or sometimes Japanese). In the end, I have given up using 我是英国人 as a starter sentence.

Yes, the look of confusion is common enough.  That doesn't really bother me though the context probably helps as generally I visit Taiwan.  

[Flickserve]

23 minutes ago, stapler said:

Does the pressure to speak Chinese from friends, family, coworkers etc translate into them trying harder to speak Chinese with you?

 

From my earlier years experience of HK Chinese, they shout louder at me. Then they would tell me off for not comprehending. It hasn't happened for a number of years now.

[snowflake]

23 minutes ago, stapler said:

Does the pressure to speak Chinese from friends, family, coworkers etc translate into them trying harder to speak Chinese with you? Could be a bonus right? "Yes I'm a really bad Chinese person please speak to me more to help me improve".

Native speakers are not necessarily more patient.  I still have to depend on language exchange partners and the like.  If there is a bonus it's that I can more easily slip into native speaking groups which is nice for hearing Mandarin the way it's actually used.

[sywi]

sure that you do have an advantage as you already know daily conversations in Cantonese so you have basic grammar and structures of Chinese language works. No worries, you; ll get there!

[Flickserve]

Something to mention about the Cantonese to Mandarin aspect.

 

Personally, I went for learning mainland Mandarin as opposed to Taiwanese Mandarin. Mainly due to simplified characters and standard Mandarin pronunciation.

 

However, the times I look at sentences of Taiwanese Mandarin, I am struck how more sentences share similarity to Cantonese. One of my difficulties is getting the words out in a mainland Chinese sentence structure. So, learning Taiwanese Mandarin may certainly be easier if coming from a Cantonese background. Bit late for me to realize this.