Cantonese practice! blogging in Cantonese...

[wai ming]

I've started a journal in Cantonese for me to practise sentence structures, vocabulary and pronunciation (and also for me to procrastinate while I'm meant to be studying for university exams! XD). You can find it here: 月光

It's written in traditional characters, in Cantonese as it is spoken (ie not Standard Chinese) and I've included Yale romanization beneath the characters for reference.

Unfortunately it's pretty boring - some vocabulary lists, some new words I've picked up - and almost everything I've written somehow relates back to Cantonese. Not to mention my Cantonese is far from good - but hey, that's why I have to practise, right?

Anyway, please feel free to post comments, corrections, suggestions etc. I'll try to update when I can, although I probably won't be writing a lot in the next couple of weeks due to exams.

EDIT: I've been too busy to work on the SBS Children's Radio Program transcription project, but I promise I'll get back to it once exams are over!

[skylee]

Nice blog. Re the names of vegetable and fruit, you may wish to know that cucumber is 青瓜 in Cantonese (well at least in HK it is 青瓜). And durian is written as 榴槤.

Personally, (I must emphasise PERSONALLY), I dislike writing in Cantonese. It is a background thing, I suppose.

[wai ming]

Nice blog. Re the names of vegetable and fruit' date=' you may wish to know that cucumber is 青瓜 in Cantonese (well at least in HK it is 青瓜). And durian is written as 榴槤.

Personally, (I must emphasise PERSONALLY), I dislike writing in Cantonese. It is a background thing, I suppose.[/quote']

Thanks, Skylee Yeah, I'm quite prone to making typos when typing in Chinese. As for 青瓜 vs 黃瓜, I actually copied the vocabulary from that list from somewhere else, and I didn't really think about it. I checked the Yahoo! HK dictionary, which has 黃瓜 = cucumber and no entry for 青瓜, same as for my paper (Mandarin) dictionary. Is this one of those differences between Mandarin and Cantonese perhaps?

As for writing in Cantonese, I guess I know what you mean, perhaps it looks too 'vulgar' or messy with all the unstandard characters. My reason for writing in Cantonese is not actually for the sake of writing in Cantonese, but rather so I can practise Cantonese. If I wrote in standard Chinese, my mind would keep switching back to Mandarin pronunciations and grammar, when what I really want to do is just get used to thinking in Cantonese.

How good is your oral cantonese? If you could be specific on the fluency' date=' would be a good thing.

Such as:

1) how many ORAL words you know

2) do you think in cantonese

3) do you talk fluently (not much pauses or hesitations)

4) tones

5) listening skills

Also how long have you been learning for and are you an ABC?[/quote']

Wannabeafreak, I'll be as specific with you as I actually can. I'm an ABC who grew up in a completely English speaking environment. My father doesn't know any Chinese at all, my mum's a Malaysian-Chinese who grew up speaking Cantonese at home, but went to a Mandarin primary school and an English high school. She never taught me Cantonese until recently when I started to get serious about learning it. All my relatives speak to me in English, or don't speak to me at all.

I started learning Mandarin when I was 9, first at Saturday classes (where we didn't learn much), and then in high school (where we learnt just enough to probably be able to survive in China). However I did a lot of self-study outside of class so I can actually read fairly well, and I do have passive knowledge of a fair amount of Mandarin vocab. In total, I learnt Mandarin formally for 7 or 8 years.

I only really started learning Cantonese last year. Prior to that I'd learnt to sing a couple of Cantopop songs, and say a couple of phrases, but that was about it. From last year onwards, my Cantonese-speaking boyfriend and good friend have been speaking a lot of Cantonese in front of me, as well as introducing me to Cantonese songs/media.

Over the summer, I used Betty Hung's "A Cantonese Book" and TY Cantonese to learn vocabulary and to practise reading out loud to my mum. I also started trying to have conversations with my mum in Canto, very slowly and a bit painfully (tones!) but I did make some progress. I can speak to people now, at a normal speed for words I'm sure of, and slowing down when I'm not sure how to say something, but the range of topics I can speak on are pretty limited.

In the last few months, I've had a couple of actual conversations with native speakers. They can almost always understand what I say, but then again, I've only spoken on limited topics. And we've always had Mandarin or English as a fall back. Often I can understand what they say, but then I don't have enough vocabulary to give a more detailed response. Other than that, my speaking is limited to occasional words/phrases/sentences with my boyfriend and conversations with my mum. I'm pretty shy about speaking, so I've never had experiences ordering meals in Cantonese etc.

Overall, it's pretty hard for me to say how many oral Cantonese words I know - the best indication of that is to see how I write on my blog. Or talk to me in person

Thinking in Cantonese - I can do that fairly easily, but I tend to fill in the gaps with Mandarin where I know the Mandarin or English - by gaps I mean vocabulary gaps, or much less frequently, grammatical gaps.

Talk fluently - I'd say not, just because I don't know enough words - or maybe I know the 'actual' Chinese words, but not the Canto pronunciation. Guess it depends on how familiar I am with what I want to say - if it's stuff I've never talked about before, for instance, I'd probably hesitate a lot more than if it was something I'd talked about a lot before. Also, if I've kind of "trained myself" to talk about a topic before, ie thought about what kind of vocabulary and sentence structures I'd use, I can obviously speak a lot more fluently than if I haven't.

Tones - generally not too much of a problem, except when I actually don't know what the correct tone is or sometimes when certain words are preceded or followed by other words.

Listening skills - by far my strength, and a lot of that has to do with my knowledge of Mandarin, as well as listening in on my bf and friend's conversations. Even if I've never come across a term in Cantonese before, I can often map it to its Mandarin pronunciation immediately. I can usually understand everyday-type conversations, as long as the speaker is speaking plainly and not playing with word puns, using 成語 (four-word phrases/idioms) or talking about something like Chinese history which I have very little knowledge of.

[yinkda]

I have just visited your blog. I appreciate very much your effort to learn Cantonese.

I would like to make a few comments. Please don’t mind.

點呀呢排

Although many Cantonese dictionaries use 排, I think that it should be 牌. 排 has nothing to do with time, but some kind of tablets (牌) were used to announce time in ancient time.

如果真係同你一生一死

Is this the exact lyrics? It should be 一生一世 IMO.

男人老狗

Instead of old dog, it may be 耇, old man, by extension respectable man.

冇原因咁發生嘅

I think that it should be 冇原因噉發生嘅.

扯 to leave

Many Cantonese dictionaries use 扯, but it doesn’t mean to leave in standard Chinese. An alternative may be 誃, which does mean to leave. The only problem is that it is pronounced ci2 instead of ce2, but there are many examples of “i” pronounced “e” colloquially: 青 cing1/ceng1.

[wai ming]

Yinkda, thanks for your comments. I always appreciate feedback.

I think you were right about almost everything, and I've made some corrections to my entries. The only thing I'm not sure about is 男人老狗 - I don't think 耇is appropriate, since the meaning was meant to be something like "Men are always dishonest", I think - it might be slang. I only used 狗 for the sound.

But anyway, thanks for taking the time to comment, and I'll try to update my blog soon.

[yinkda]

I discovered the expression 男人老gau2 on the forum dayoo.com a few years ago. As far as I know, it is not pejorative. Hereafter are some examples.

http://hanyu.chi.cuhk.edu.hk/chetio.asp?chetio=20962

男人老狗 = 大男人的

http://hanyu.chi.cuhk.edu.hk/chetio.asp?chetio=4591

男人佬耇 = 男子漢大丈夫﹐大男人

http://www.pkucn.com/archiver/?tid-28446.html

男人老耇，点可以认低威

From various links:

男人老狗怕什麼？！

男人老狗小小事就喊!

男人老狗，流血不流淚。

[skylee]

I've also written something in Cantonese in my blog, mainly to practise my Cantonese input skill. Take a look (it's a blogspot site and in unicode) -> http://voidsky.blogspot.com/2006/08/blog-post.html

[Mugi]

Originally posted by yinkda

點呀呢排

Although many Cantonese dictionaries use 排, I think that it should be 牌. 排 has nothing to do with time, but some kind of tablets (牌) were used to announce time in ancient time.

Actually, this word isn't of Chinese origin, so it's kind of arbitrary how you choose to write it in Chinese characters. The word is a 百越 remnant and can be found in many (if not most) southern Sinitic languages. In Cantonese dialects it usually refers to a "period of time" (M: 陣子, 會兒), whereas in Minnan it is used to denote "number of times" (M: 次, 回, 遍 etc). The most common repesentation of "paai4-2" in Cantonese is 排, although some people do write is as 牌.

[wai ming]

Thanks skylee for posting about the Jyutping input function on mdbg (Jyutping input for Cantonese)

真係容易過copy+paste嘅方法。