Found some interesting HKATV documentaries on Non-Chinese people speaking Cantonese in Hong Kong:

Norwegian
Part 1: 03:24min	Part 2: 07:17min	Part 3: 09:39min

Indian
Part 1: 04:38min	Part 2: 06:01min	Part 3: 09:49min

New Zealand / Australian
Part 1: 09:17min	Part 2: 05:30min	Part 3: 05:14min

American
Part 1: 09:25min	Part 2: 05:29min	Part 3: 05:20min

I am quite often asked by people why I love Cantonese so much. I grew up in a small city called Canberra and studied at the Australian National University. Prior to entering University I knew nothing about Chinese people. I remember how much I hated seeing Chinese people not speaking English in public thinking how disrespectful it was to our Australian culture.

My first contact with Chinese people occurred at University when living at Burton and Garran Hall, which is a dormitory housing many local and overseas students. For several Finance and Marketing subjects, I recall being randomly placed into a team group to complete an assignment and I was quite disgruntled when Mandarin was the primary language of communication of our group. I had no idea what my team members were talking about and I felt quite excluded. They always talked in Mandarin and translated for me in English; it would have been easier to just use English as it took double the time to say the same thing.

Throughout my University life, I met many Cantonese and Mandarin speakers. I remember many miserable moments when being invited to group dinners. On these occasions I felt excluded, bored and upset. I knew everyone could speak English but they chose to talk in Chinese. All I could understand was my name mentioned every so often; I spent the night looking at their faces trying to figure out if they were making fun of me. Some people even tried to make me the night’s entertainment by asking me to repeat some words (eg. ni hao) and laughed at my poor accent. From this incident, I concluded non-Chinese will never have the ability to speak Chinese.

Prior to December 2005 I couldn’t care less about speaking Chinese. Then in December 2005, I became quite interested in learning Mandarin. I thought of the future importance and usefulness it will have if I one day decided to work in China. I employed a private Mandarin tutor as my wife is not a native Mandarin speaker, and so started studying. If I’m going to learn Mandarin properly, I sure didn’t want to hear my wife’s heavy Cantonese accent. My wife from Hong Kong told me her family will visit us at the end of January 2006, and I knew her entire family could only speak Cantonese. I started thinking how impressed they would be if I could say a few basic sentences and answer some simple YES/NO questions. So I started listening to the Pimsleur Cantonese course and practiced speaking some basic sentences with my wife. I asked her to speak 100% Cantonese to me, but proved to be an ineffective method; I simply couldn’t understand a thing. After completing the Pimsleur course, I still struggled to string 2 useful sentences together when my wife’s family arrived. I felt discouraged and depressed, so I searched the Internet for Cantonese learning resources. I came across an excellent Cantonese beginner’s site http://chinese-lessons.com/ teaching an array of vocabulary and grammar. It took me 1 week to read all the grammar explanations and listen to each audio WAV file 50-100 times. I learnt more in 1 week than in 1 month of Pimsleur.

In March, my Mandarin teacher from Hangzhou mentioned to me that she had started learning Cantonese. She told me there was a Cantonese beginner’s course at the Meadowbank’s TAFE in Sydney. I started class 5 weeks late and stopped going at week 9. I was so disgusted that on the 9th week, students were still learning how to make a basic sentence. I discovered a massive Cantonese knowledgebase and asked my wife to teach me more and more from online resources. Around April-June, I attended an Advanced Level Cantonese course in the city, which turned out to be a beginner’s level. How could people with 1000 word vocabularies consider themselves Advanced? The students couldn’t even string a sentence together or answer any question without English. I went to Hong Kong in June spending ~2 weeks speaking 80% Cantonese; I surprisingly improved more in 2 weeks then in 6 months.

I came to realize how critical Cantonese is to survive in non-tourist or expatriate suburbs. I returned to Australia and discovered Steve Kaufmann, a linguist who mastered 9 languages adopting his language study approach. I quit wasting my time on Mandarin and asked my wife to make hundreds of 2-3 minute MP3 dialogues. I studied everyday; before work, on the train, walking to work, during work, and after work. I became obsessed with Cantonese, studying for a minimum of 10 hours per day and weekends even longer. My vocabulary and fluency improved dramatically when my wife started to speak 100% to me in Cantonese and my environment was now primarily Cantonese. I hired a Guangzhou tutor to teach me in addition to my wife’s intensive and free Cantonese lessons.

I started watching the “Young and Dangerous” triad series. I asked my wife to rent hundreds of triad, action and love films from the local VCD store. I was now glued to Cantonese movies, at the same time thinking how impressive would it be if I could speak the same language as these people.

However, I had never seen a non-Chinese speak Cantonese absolutely fluently before. Is it even possible for a non-Chinese to speak it? Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic. My hero 河國榮 Ho Kwok Wing, who I saw speaking Cantonese incredibly fluently immediately encouraged me. From then I decided I would do whatever it took to speak Cantonese fluently, I must speak it fluently and that’s all that matters to me.

For the past few months, I’ve been studying from multiple books and resources. The most challenging is “Advanced Level Current Cantonese Colloquialisms”.

The book covers “current” colloquial expressions and conversational slag. Though in my study, a few Native speakers have told me many of the words taught are very old-fashion and would not be spoken by today’s generation.

In some cases the vocabulary taught didn’t really match the English definition. It was very important for me to have a native speaker go through each word explaining when I should say it. For me, its very important to not look stupid saying words out of context or clearly mis-understanding the underlying meaning.

Dialogue (1:51 min):

Another challenge I had was that each track on the CD represented 1 unit or topic, making it extremely difficult to repeat vocabulary or dialogues over-and-over. There was also a lot of pauses between each word and sub-section. To solve this problem I recorded each CD track to my computer and used a WAV editor to split each track into smaller audio files. To effectively remember the words and phrases perfectly, I needed to repeat each word and dialogue at a higher frequency.

In addition, the dialogues didn’t feel like the standard TV or daily conversations heard. The amount of colloquial words and phrases spoken in each dialogue made it feel very unnatural and awkward. Though, I did listen to each dialogue and vocabulary list hundreds of times.

I’ve forced myself to watch hours upon hours of TVB series each day recently. The current series I’ve been watching is (酒店風雲 Zau2 Dim3 Fung1 Wan4). The English title doesn’t translate to the Chinese title but it is “Revolving Door of Vengeance”.

Once I finish watching the entire set, I’ll watch it again. I keep an Online Dictionary by my side to learn new vocabulary as its spoken. I’m quite fluent in Jyutping romanisation, so its quite easy for me to look up definitions quickly. At the moment I can understand about 30-40% of what’s being said overall.

I hope this % improves gradually with watching more series, listening to dialogues, reviewing vocabulary and communicating with natives on a daily basis.

Who do you think is more impressive…?

I guess neither is as impressive as the other. However, the Chinese-American is considered a normal everyday ocurrence.

Native Cantonese speaker (Caucasian):

Sharon Balcombe was born in Hong Kong, received full Chinese education, and speaks Cantonese as her mother tongue.

Video 1: 09:26min	Video 2: 06:59min

Imagine every day having people walk up complementing your command of Cantonese. “Where did you learn? You are so smart!” Turn the table around, when we see a Chinese person speaking English with an American accent; we consider it normal, right? So imagine going up to every Chinese looking person in America saying “Where did you learn English? You are so smart!”

One may consider English to be the “international language” of the world, hence its normal for Chinese to speak English. For a few Chinese, a white person saying a few basic sentences of Cantonese will turn heads and receive praises. Even trying to take a taxi or buy some food may become a marathon task resulting in complements, questions or conversations about your life history.

When I told several Chinese that you don’t have to be Chinese to speak Cantonese like an ethnic Chinese, they quickly rejected my comment. These people were convinced that the best they’ve seen was Ho Kwok Wing (河國榮) - an Aussie in Hong who speaks Advanced fluent Cantonese with an accent. They insisted that its just not possible to have a native cantonese speaker who is Caucasian.

Since so few non-Chinese are able to speak a decent apptitude of Cantonese, many people cannot imagine it possible for Caucasians to speak Cantonese natively.

For foreigners trying to learn Cantonese vocabulary and/or make an effort to read written Chinese in Cantonese; you will quickly discover that there is nearly always 2 forms for each word: The written version and the spoken version. It amazes me how Cantonese learners/Hong Kong students learn to write/read Chinese (based on Mandarin) and speak Cantonese. The words and grammar can be so different that you wonder how people manage to achieve any written fluency.

An example I’ll give is: What do you want to eat?

ORAL:
你想食乜嘢呀 ?
nei5 soeng2 sik6 mat1 je5 aa3?

WRITTEN:
你想吃什麼東西 ?
nei5 soeng2 hek3 sam6 mo1 dung1 sai1?

What I understand is that all newspapers and books are written in written Chinese (based on Mandarin), so to be read by all speakers of other dialects. In some cases; writing in Oral Cantonese is discouraged, though can be seen on Internet chats, forums and entertainment magazines.

Especially listening to Cantonese music (eg. Canto Pop), the lyrics are more often than not exclusive to Written Chinese in Cantonese pronunciation. I dream of the day when I can actually understand a song fully.

I’m sure most foreigners trying to learn Cantonese has heard “Why learn Cantonese? Mandarin is more useful and easier” at least once in their life.

I’ll give an example; you are in Hong Kong and 99% of people around you are speaking Cantonese. Your wife, radio, television, and all people on the streets are talking away in Cantonese. The cable television has less than 10 Mandarin and English channels out of 100+ Cantonese. You then start talking Cantonese and become entertainment for the myriads of small minded locals who truely believe only Chinese are capable of speaking any form of Chinese. Then you start receiving the daily annoyance “Why are you learning Cantonese? Mandarin is more useful and easier to learn“. They continue to state,

• Mandarin is the future and in the future nearly everyone in Hong Kong will have the ability to speak Mandarin. Many Hong Kong people can already speak Mandarin.Speaking tomorrows language today sure doesn’t make a lot of sense when I’m trying to order local food without pointing and looking like a circus act today.
• You can already speak English, that’s good enough. This one makes me extremely angry; so I wasted the hundreds and hundreds of hours on this language for nothing?
• There are too many tones in Cantonese; Cantonese has 6 tones, where Mandarin has only 4 making it easier for you to pick up the language quickly. In addition, you will never speak Cantonese with the correct accent. I wonder if they are challenging my ability to learn Cantonese (calling me stupid), or trying to brainwash me to give up so I never understand what people around me are saying?
• Mandarin is a language; while Cantonese is a dialect. You should learn the official language of China and not a dialect. How does this make any difference to my situation (everyone around me speaks Cantonese; and I’m being told to learn Mandarin). It doesn’t matter what the official status of a dialect is to a nation, the fact of the matter is that if I don’t learn the language/dialect what people around me are speaking; I will always feel left out at dinners, conversations and never integrate into society.

How on God’s earth can Mandarin or English be more useful for me when 100% of what I’m hearing is in Cantonese?