Tag Archives: language study

“Gau go gaau gau gau ge!” Song by The Police or Cantonese tongue twister?

Posted by expatlingo in languages and tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Nine plastic dogs is enough!

Since Chinese New Year, I’ve been studying Cantonese with a small group of beginners. Our class consists of a few Brits, a few Dutch, a token American (me) and a token Beijinger.

As our instructor has guided us through a check-list of basic topics — taxi directions, food, shopping, family relationships, the weather, colors, etc. — the more distractible and deviant members of the group have slowly collected enough Cantonese homonyms to devise a mini-tongue twister:

九個膠狗够嘅 !

“九個膠狗够嘅 !” is pronounced like this in Cantonese: “Gau go gaau gau gau ge!” (with Jyupting tone markings: gau2 go3 gaau1 gau2 gau3 ge3). The meaning of this tongue twister is: Nine plastic dogs are enough!

Sticklers, please forgive us, we’ve picked a generic and imprecise measure word for “dog” but we did it in keeping with the spirit of the tongue twister’s “g” sound. Are there other errors? Please let me know!

This side-game has firmly stuck six Cantonese words in my mind and (I think) helped me to understand one Cantonese final particle — ge — more clearly.

Here is another Cantonese tongue twister that fills in a few more Canto vocab blanks: Go go go go gou gwo go go go go (click through for Youtube video).

Neither of these short sentences, however, can match the famous Classical Chinese tongue twister, “Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den,” which uses the sound “shi” and only the sound “shi” (with varying tones) for 10 straight lines of poetry.

《施氏食獅史》
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。

 ”Shī Shì shí shī shǐ”

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
“Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”
In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

Do you study languages? Any great tongue-twisters or word games to share? Do you think The Police tune, “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” was really just a secret Cantonese tongue twister?

Related posts:

My Cantonese is improving thanks to the NRA
My accidental Chinese language partner, the telemarketer
Getting into language character, or: I’ll wear a half-shirt if it will help my Chinese
Mini-bus language angst. To speak or not to speak…in Cantonese.
Milestones in a Foreign Language: “I went from talking like an evil baby to talking like a hillbilly”
Language Fails. My own failures of communication in French, Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese.
China’s Pearl River Delta = Woe for the Chinese Language Student

My Cantonese is improving thanks to the NRA

Posted by expatlingo in cartoon, Hong Kong, languages and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

expatlingo nra cantonese comic

Around the time the National Rifle Association (NRA) announced that its solution to the Sandy Hook tragedy is armed guards in every American school, my love for Hong Kong, and its strict gun laws, low crime rate and strong economy, grew tenfold.

In fact, I’ve been inspired by the NRA to re-double my efforts to learn basic, friendly every-day Cantonese.

So over the weekend, I braved the holiday crowds and took a special trip to Hong Kong Island from my home in the New Territories (also know as “Mordor” to the Hong Kong Islanders) to seek out a few more Cantonese study books.

First I checked out Eslite, the three-level Taiwanese books store at Hong Kong’s newest mall, Hysan Place in Causeway Bay. They had a full shelf of Mandarin learning books for English speakers and a grand total of two Cantonese learning books for English speakers, one of which I already own. So I bought the other one: the Lonely Planet Cantonese Phrasebook.

After riding the tram from Causeway Bay to Central, I enjoyed a nice lunch of garlic eggplant and pork dumplings and then visited the two bookstores at the IFC mall in Central: Bookazine and Dymocks. There I found another Cantonese study book, “Interesting Cantonese” by Susanna Ng. More of a list of sentences than a language study book, I bought it because there is simply so little out there. Well, that and because it taught me how to say “ParknShop” and “7Eleven” in Cantonese (Baak Gai and Chat Sahp Yaht) as well as a bunch of Hong Kong place-names.

Cantonese study books

Now I have four books to help me learn Cantonese, plus some Pimsluer language CDs. I could really use a class, but since I live in the aforementioned “Mordor of Hong Kong” that is easier said than done, so I’ll use my books and CDs for a bit.

Despite my newfound enthusiasm, I still secretly feel that studying Cantonese is a practice in futility:

  1. Many (most?) locals speak (some) English. Well, save for the ParknShop clerks and the ladies who collect the rubbish from my house. And those who speak English, answer back in English as this funny video by Norwegian Cantonese teacher Cecilie Gamst Berg illustrates:
  2. There is no standardized system for Romanizing Cantonese (that is, writing it out using the alphabet–like Pinyin for Mandarin). So each book uses a slightly different system to account for sounds and tones.
  3. Bloody traditional characters. Thanks to my previous Mandarin studies I can read a slew of simplified characters. But in Hong Kong they use the traditional characters. Obvious ones that I see every day I know, like 車 for 车, 長 for 长, and 電 for 电. But I often get lost in a maze of strokes when trying to suss out traditional characters. (Don’t hate me Hongkongers, I know you love them.)
  4. Lastly, and related to all of the above, I think native Hongkongers secretly don’t want the rest of use to learn Cantonese. After all, how will they gossip about us and our spotty, untaken-care-of skin then?

Still, I will persist if only to learn enough to be a bit more chatty with the eternally friendly rubbish ladies and to stick it to the NRA. After all, I can have a coveted permanent Hong Kong ID card and “right of abode” in only 6.25 more years.

(What does the comic say? Credit is due to the Wikipedia page, Cantonese profanity, for help with the comic. “仆街”, pronounced “puk1 gaai1″ can mean both “prick” and “drop dead” and “can also be used in daily life under a variety of situations to express annoyance, disgrace or other emotions.” “𨳒” pronounced “diu2″ means “f*ck.” The full phrase roughly means: “Disgraceful prick! F*ck your gun rights!”)

Related posts:

China’s Pearl River Delta = Woe for the Chinese Language Student

Mini-bus language angst

The Retrograde Chinese Lesson (Comic)

Gun-toting, Cantonese hillbillies in the New Territories

Mini-bus language angst

Posted by expatlingo in Hong Kong, languages and tagged with , , , ,

When you take a “Public Light Bus” or mini-bus around Hong Kong, you have to call out to the driver when you want to be let off.

And sure, you can just say in English “Next stop, please,” and the driver will acknowledge you and let you off the bus. But where is the fun in that when you could also memorize a simple Cantonese phrase to make the same thing happen. There are several ways to ask the driver to stop:

下 一 站 haah yat jhaam, m’goi (Next stop, please.)

有 落 yauh lohk (This stop. Literally: “fall down.”)

(Partially from Lesson 4 of RTHK’s “Naked Cantonese.” Transcript available here.)

The trouble is that in my neighborhood there are loads of Western expats and maids from the Philippines who all just yell out in English.

So every time the bus approaches my stop, I start a mini-internal-debate:

“Should I call out in Cantonese?”

“Will I look like a tool if I do since the driver obviously understands the English phrase?”

“Do I care if I look like a tool?”

“Nah, screw it, I’ll say it in Cantonese.”

And then right when I’m ready to shout out, one of the maids calls out in English: “Next stop, please!”

(Photo from Wikipedia.)

Milestones in a foreign language: “I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly.”

Posted by expatlingo in languages, read and tagged with , , , , , , ,

David Sedaris, like the lovely Julia Child who I quoted last week, is another America who has spent stretches of time as an expat in France. For those who don’t know him, he’s a humorist/writer who revels in the dark and absurd aspects of his own life growing up in North Carolina, and living as an adult in New York City and France.

In “Me Talk Pretty One Day” he writes about his struggle to learn French.

On making the first wobbly steps in a new language:

“Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. ‘Is them the thoughts of cows?’ I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the front window. ‘I want me some lamb chops with handles on ‘em.’”

On the difficulty of memorizing the gender of nouns:

“I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. …

‘What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I’ll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard. This works until it’s time to order and I decide that because it sometimes loses its makeup, a sandwich is undoubtedly feminine.

“I just can’t manage to keep my stories straight. Hoping I might learn through repetition, I tried using gender in my everyday English. ‘Hi, guys,’ I’d say, opening a new box of paper clips, or ‘Hey, Hugh, have you seem by belt? I can’t find her anywhere.’ I invented personalities for the objects on my dresser and set them up on blind dates….”

Struggling to memorize Chinese characters has forced me into similar games. I’ve made up many, many silly stories to help me remember the meaning and pronunciation of characters. For example, this character:

means foundation or base. For me, the meaning was easy enough to remember, since it looks kind of like a structure balanced on a base, but I couldn’t remember the sound. So I looked at it a long time and came to convince myself that it also kind of looks like a guy being stabbed in the crotch with a sword. And, facing such pain, one thing he might scream is “ji!”

My brain is cluttered with all kinds of bizarre stories like this. Bizarre ones tend to have better “sticking power.”

But I still mix them up. For example, this character:

Is that a little tank bullying a man? And if so, what did that mean?

Language Fails

Posted by expatlingo in expat life, languages and tagged with , , , , , , , ,

I aspire to speak a foreign language fluently. I’ve been aspiring for some time and so far I have a muddle that gets me by some of the time in some places. I have just enough basic vocabulary and brazenness to be the cause of many language failures:

1. The classic: being looked down on by a French speaker. Despite not really knowing French, I decided to casually ask for tickets to the castle in Luxembourg City in the local language. Approaching the window and holding up two fingers I, rather coolly, said trios (three). The guy behind the counter then rolled his eyes at me and asked, in English, if I meant “two.”

2. Mispronouncing foreign words and then lying about it. I embarrassingly used the French work chic, but pronounced it as “chick” instead of “sheek.” I blame the brand of tight jeans everyone wore to my elementary school in the 1980s for this mistake (see “Chic Jeans” ad below). Despite this excuse, it is still wrong. As I made the mistake in front of only Europeans, I covered it up by lying and saying that “chick” is the way Americans always pronounce chic.

3. Inserting Spanish into Mandarin and visa versa. Unlike French, I did actually study Spanish in school and can correctly say a few things. So when I started studying Mandarin, I instinctively inserted Spanish words to fill gaps in my Mandarin. So, for example, I’d say pero for “dog” instead of gou in the middle of a Chinese sentence. Fortunately the Chinese, unlike the French, are very kind and were usually just pleased I could say much of anything at all.

Somewhere along the way my brain started processing Mandarin better than Spanish. This was, rather unluckily, around the same time we moved from China to Europe and starting taking vacations in Spain. I then had the reverse problem of plugging Mandarin into Spanish sentences. So I’d frequently say things like yi dian dian instead of un poco for “a little bit.”

4. Cantonese is not just “sing-song-y” Mandarin.  In Hong Kong, I’m a new learner of Cantonese, which is just similar enough to Mandarin to be a little easy and also very confusing. My biggest Mandarin/Cantonese muddle so far was with two hotel cleaners yesterday. They very sweetly starting chatting to me in body language and Cantonese sprinkled with English about my kids. The basic Mandarin/Cantonese problem quickly reared its head: some words are exactly the same (tricking my brain into thinking and speaking in Mandarin) and some words are completely different (leading the cleaners to wonder what kind of weird mixed up language I was trying to speak). I was basically speaking to them in Mandarin with a sing-song-y Cantonese lilt added to the end of every sentence. They smiled sweetly, obviously thought I was nuts, and quickly switched to their own basic Mandarin to get us through.

5. Full circle: making a mistake with “two” in Cantonese (rather than French). To my ears, the Mandarin number one sounds almost exactly the same as the Cantonese number two. One is a high tone and one is a low tone, but it’s still very, very easy to mix up when you’re trying to think on your toes. I’ve already made this mistake several times, but no one rolled their eyes, I just received less change back than expected.

Related posts:

China’s Pearl River Delta: woe for the Chinese language student

[Comic] The Retrograde Chinese Lesson