Iranian American Speaking Fluent Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin) Started learning Chinese at 19 and now speaks perfect Chinese in both Cantonese and Mandarin, and what’s more incredible he has never been to China or Hong Kong.

I think he is naturally gifted in languages and speaking in general. He didn’t even have one “ummm” or “ahhh” in his entire video. Even in English I cannot speak for this period of time without needing to think or hesitate to some extent.

I don’t normally watch Pearl, however, I unintentionally came across a great video of Greg Smith who has lived in Hong Kong for 2 decades. After watching it on TV, I downloaded it from RTHK website, and then uploaded to Youtube for your enjoyment. Coincidentally, I think he looks like 大山 a famous Beijing Westerner.

The other day I went to MacDonald’s and ordered the usual Double Cheese Burger and Strawberry Milkshake. The 40 or so year old man took down the order and spoke Cantonese. Though after that he proceeded to say in English “Your Cantonese is bad, don’t speak it”. This suddenly shocked me and probably it is the first time in years to have someone say this to me taking me back to the very early days.

I suddenly blasted attacks in Cantonese which actually made me just as bad as he was. I lied and told the manager he said 死鬼佬 sei2 gwai2 lou2, all I wanted was the burger and he discriminated against me etc.

Now I’m feeling depressed and unhappy about what I have achieved. I used to think I was pretty good, but after watching other non-Chinese Cantonese speakers such as Michael below; I realise my vocabulary is way too elementary. Even though I can understand what’s on TV without much problems at all now, I listened to Michael’s speech and immediately needed to look up 10 sentences or phrases. If this was a real conversation, I would be incredibly annoying to the speaker for not understanding.

So seriously this year, its time to pick up my game and learn Cantonese. I’ll put up an MP3 of my current Cantonese within the next day or so. What I can say now is that I promise to master Cantonese no matter what it takes!

Michael has excellent Cantonese and has studied for 13 years in Canada. He also has advanced writing skills too - http://faailok.spaces.live.com/ which is even more impressive.

I felt burnt out after nearly 2 years of non-stop studying of Cantonese that I took the last month and a bit off from proactive studying to simply just using what I’ve got and slowly improve on what I already know.

It appears my colleagues are now using Cantonese with me all the time now, and they said my tones are 80-90% correct all the time which I’m happy with.

My writing is slowly getting better but still like a year 1 student. This will be my main focus for 2008…. I will start level 2 of the writing course I’ve started in Wan Chai in a couple of days.

I will also start on actively using Cantophilia and Marcelo’s blog (links can be found on the side menu) which provide excellent resource material.

I will get my wife to record more MP3s but at a more advance level.

Even though I understand a lot and can speak semi-smoothly, I want to build up my level so its more natural and smooth.

I was interviewed a week or so ago by Gary Choi of SBS Radio Australian Cantonese Radio station in Cantonese as part of the Happy Paradise Children’s Program.

Please let me know how I sound now? Remember this wasn’t scripted and I didn’t know the questions before answering.

When I first started to learn Cantonese and even up to a few days ago, I thought that reading and writing Chinese would be a total waste of my time. Speaking Cantonese fluently is all that I needed and I would be happy. Besides street signs are written in both English and Chinese.

I was only kidding myself as I continually found it difficult to build my vocabulary to the advanced level without characters and relying 100% on Cantodict Parser to translate everything to Jyutping. I still wanted to build my spoken fluency first, then maybe tackle characters next year or the year after.

Yesterday, I found a school very close to my workplace, Hong Kong Language Learning Centre. I walked in and spoke in English, “I want to learn some Cantonese”. She asked if I was interested in their Beginner Level 1 Spoken class. Being modest, I replied that maybe Intermediate classes would suit me since I already knew a little. After a short conversation she pointed out a few things about my Cantonese:

- Pronunciation needs a little more work which gets worse when I speak fast
- I speak quite fluently but difficult at times because I speak too fast
- In general my tones are good but fall apart when speaking too fast

So simply speaking, I speak too fast and need to slow down. When I finally slowed down, I sounded quite good and she had no problems in communicating with me.

She suggested that I am better than some of their Advanced - Level 2 students and probably even Level 3. I took a look at their course materials for these levels and I found that I knew more than 80% or 90% of the new vocabulary. I’m quite paranoid of non-native foreign accents and bad habits affecting my Cantonese, that I decided to choose the Reading and Writing Beginner Level 1 class instead. She explained that the students could already speak fluently.

Luckily the term commenced last night, I signed up and started the class that day - quite cheap $2300HKD for 10 lessons (2 hours each). There were 2 other students in the class, surprisingly they were both native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers and victims of parents who thought English was superior to Chinese. These students grew up and studied half their life in Hong Kong (International school) before moving to Canada during primary school. Worried I might drown in the constant flow of advanced spoken Cantonese, I amazed myself and could understand 95% of what the teacher was saying.

I have never intentionally learnt to read, but I have accumulated a few hundred characters through daily exposure of street signs, sub-titles, and Cantodict. Our first lesson was quite interesting as I learnt the Cantonese names of the 12 strokes and learnt the stroke orders, character rules and some meanings for some characters.

We practiced to write following characters: 一二三四五六七八九十口月日水王玉山木田魚火明女子好人中不年有我你您他她們是美個高國

I’ve decided to learn how to read as fast as possible! I know Steve Kaufmann learnt to read a newspaper fluently in 6 months, so I’m sure its not as impossible as I once was lead to believe.

So I spent the last 6 days in Mainland China for a holiday. It wasn’t the complete culture shock being that road rules seem to not exist or sales assistants follow you everywhere you go that made me feel uncomfortable, it was that the so-called local language seemed to not exist.

廣州 - gwong2 zau1 - Guangzhou (the Capital of Cantonese) left me rather disappointed. It seemed that the majority are non-Cantonese people and simply refused to learn. You speak Cantonese, and you get replied back in Mandarin or extremely accented Cantonese. Not like Hong Kong where people know Cantonese but want to practice English, when I speak Cantonese they simply cannot speak it and continue in Mandarin until I stop them and they grab another person to help me in Cantonese. I get replies like “How is it possible that you know Cantonese and not Mandarin?”

When I actually found a local (seemed like 1 in 10 people), I was immediately elevated to “GOD” status. They loved me speaking Cantonese and treated me like a native Cantonese speaker.

On the other hand, 潮汕 - ciu4 saan3 - Chao Shan, being (潮州 - ciu4 zau1 - Chaozhou) and (汕頭 - saan3 tau4 - Shantou), two major Guangdong cities were both very limited in Cantonese. Some would reply in super broken Cantonese or Mandarin. Most people can understand Cantonese but can’t speak it well. If I spoke in Cantonese, then I couldn’t understand their Mandarin. Though shops would normally have a sales person who could speak Cantonese quite well and were happy to use Cantonese but with a heavier accent than mine.

In Guangdong, there is a vast amount of Cantonese resources. All Hong Kong television stations are available, and the Mainland even have many Cantonese TV and radio channels of their own. Though in Guangzhou, it still confuses me how people could learn to understand the language perfectly but couldn’t be bothered to open their mouths to speak Cantonese after 20 years of living there. I even saw many situations where one person spoke Cantonese and the other replied back in Mandarin. Seemed to be very popular in Guangzhou for people to speak their native language and receive replies in another.

This has not deterred me from learning Cantonese, or distracted me to take up Mandarin. On my return to Hong Kong and sharing my experience, my colleagues insisted that I should start learning Mandarin to be able to communicate with Mainland Chinese. However, many of them couldn’t speak Mandarin themselves, showing simply a double standards point-of-view on Chinese language.

I’m so sick of the learn Mandarin talk that I’ve listed why I shouldn’t learn it (pardon any ignorance):

1) No environment - Everyone including my family only speak Cantonese all the time.
2) I’m not interested in going to Shenzhen every weekend to practice Mandarin.
3) I’m not interested to learn Mandarin for short trips to China every year.
4) I’m not really interested in doing business in China (which it seems to be many people’s motivation).
5) Actually only 53% of Chinese people in China can speak Mandarin (source). So the exaggerated myth that 1.3 billion speakers cannot be as valued as wide spread languages like Spanish or French.