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.

Listening to Cantonese over-and-over…

Cantonese is very tonal; the wrong tone can cause misunderstanding, even in context. It’s virtually impossible to remember words and tones through memorising a dictionary. So how can I learn massive amounts of vocabulary without sounding like a pitch-less opera singer? Speaking fluently requires memorisation of vocabulary and knowing how to say them correctly at the correct tone. In addition, one needs to learn how to use the words in a sentence structure. So far in my studies, I have forced 5000 or so words into my brain through massive listening of repeated audio in under 1 year.

My study regime is 90% listening and 10% speaking. However, I speak Cantonese without thinking in English, and my tones are mostly accurate. I constantly improve without being in a fully immersed environment. I do admit I cannot read any Chinese characters, but in my opinion the time spent in memorising 1 written character cannot possibly outweigh the benefits of learning 10 new words through listening. Especially Written Chinese doesn’t match with Oral Cantonese; it doesn’t help my goal of spoken fluency. I want to be able to use the language to communicate as soon as possible.

Using my iPod, I learn about 15-20 new words, phrases or idioms per day on average. I would begin each day by identifying definitions of each new word first before I listen for 1-2 hour to the same dialogue until it becomes assimilated and automatic. This is extremely beneficial in more complicated phrases, idioms or important words that you often like to say, but don’t listen to them enough in movies or conversations to remember correctly. I have a native speaker explain in Cantonese how to use each new word or phrase in context before I start my listening marathon. I regularly talk to myself in Cantonese with these new words and phrases to ensure when I need to converse to a native speaker, my words come off the tip off my tongue like in English.

Listening to new dialogues each day has improved my intonations and listening comprehension for real-life usage. It has dramatically helped me recognise vocabulary and recall its meaning instantly. In addition to listening to dialogues, I listen for 2 hours each day to vocabulary lists (10-20 new words/phrases/idioms). Instead of making a dialogue, the words are simply spoken one after another. I feel this improves my vocabulary much quicker then a dialogue because the words are spoken more clearly, helping in correct tone recognition and pronunciation. As I have researched the meaning and usage of the words before listening, I find that listening only to specific vocabulary allows me to learn more words in a single hit.

I have learnt that you cannot say a word correctly, if you haven’t heard it properly to begin with. Using this method, I can speak naturally without thinking, my tones are very accurate, and my comprehension has improved. I remember when I was in Hong Kong briefly in June, I wanted to know how to say “recharge” as in top up my Octupus card. I thought I heard people say “zan3 zik1″, when in fact the correct pronunciation is “增值 / zang1 zik6″. This is an example where not hearing the word clearly or enough to begin with can cause problems later on.

My spoken fluency has dramatically improved through repetitive listening, and my recall of words has started to become effortless. I am only now starting to benefit from watching TVB Hong Kong series as a supplement to my studies.

Will I forget words? I sometimes forget new words learnt, however, I regularly revise already learnt material each day. The more often I listen to and revise words, they start becoming like English words: Perfect understanding of the meaning with no effort in recalling how to use and say them. I have a higher chance of remembering a word that I have heard 200 times, then someone who goes to a class and hears that word once every week.

I previously wrote briefly about Steve Kaufmann incredibly speaking 9 languages fluently, English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Swedish, German, Cantonese and Italian.

Steve speaking Cantonese (15:29min) :
Steve does not practise or actively speak Cantonese anymore.

- note: first 10 seconds have audio problems

The following presentation was conducted by Steve Kaufmann in part English and Japanese. He offers very valuable advice on learning languages. I found it quite informative and a very useful resource:

Video 1: 09:33min	Video 2: 09:54min	Video 3: 09:32min
Video 4: 08:16min	Video 5: 09:35min

Steve emphasises gaining vocabulary, while grammar is acquired naturally through massive input. After reading and watching as much material about Steve, he states the way to gain fluency is through gaining a large amount of vocabulary. In the above videos, Steve says you need to recognise and know how to use around 10,000 words in the correct situations to be adequately fluent.

Steve says “Vocabulary is much more important than grammar, by far, not even close! You have to have a lot of words. If you have enough words, you will speak.” He states that he never does grammar exercises and prefers to listen and read the same material over-and-over.

Studying grammar is counter productive; he continues to say, “If you have to think through a grammar rule, you will slow yourself down. You have to develop a reflex, and having the grammar rules is not going to develop that natural reflex.” You cannot improve by just speaking, you need to “upgrade” by reading and listening to new words and phrases. Speaking makes up a small portion of the learning process; as you need to absorb massive amounts through the listening process.

Steve Kaufmann speaks 9 languages fluently, English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Swedish, German, Cantonese and Italian. Steve interviews Max, a Swede learning Mandarin (14:10mins). As I cannot understand Mandarin, I had a native speaker translate for me. It deals with Max’s study of Mandarin and Cantonese, his thoughts on Pimsleur, and how repetitive listening to the same material improved Max’s fluency. I am highly impressed with Max’s Mandarin in 1 year of serious study, and not living in China:

Why not just watch the news or TV series?

In an article written by Steve, he is asked about the benefits of repetitive listening to English content as compared to just listening to CNN or TV sitcoms. Children do not listen repetitively to the same content when learning their mother tongue.

In my view the answer depends on the level and the goals of the learner. For a beginner or low intermediate and even many intermediate learners, CNN and sitcoms are too difficult to understand.

Children listen to a limited range of content even though it is not repetitive listening to recorded content. The subject matter and vocabulary is limited. The child also takes many years to reach the level of vocabulary and the ability required to express complex ideas. The adult learner can reach that level in less than a year.

In another article by Steve, I often hear people say that they like watching movies and TV programs to learn English. I have always maintained that repetitive reading and listening is more useful for language improvement. The reason is simple. In watching movies you have lots of clues as to what is going on. The dialogue is not so concentrated unless you are watching a very intellectual movie.

Think of people speaking their own language. Who will express themselves better, whether in writing or speaking, people who watch a lot of TV and movies, or people who read a lot? I rest my case.

In my first month of learning Cantonese, I learnt a mere 100 spoken words. I calculated 100 x 12 months = 1200 words per year if I continued on this pattern. As Pimsleur moved so slowly and painfully, I didn’t think it was possible to learn any faster.

The Linguist classifies a persons speaking ability by the number of words you know: Beginner a) 2,000 b) 3,500 Intermediate a) 5,000 b) 7,500 Advanced a) 10,000 b) 12,500

I thought that it would take 10 years to become advanced. Especially Cantonese being very tonal and intonations being very important, it takes much longer to accurately learn a word correctly. Saying a word with the wrong tone more often than not gives a different meaning.

My goal is to be functional in Cantonese as fast as humanly possible without total immersion in my first year of study.

I discovered that learning from reading is not effective, I would go to the dictionary and read:
超級市場 = ciu1 kap1 si5 coeng4 = supermarket

I committed this word to memory and then attempt to use it a few days later in a conversation. Even if I can remember the pronunciation of this word, I have already forgotten the tones. I haven’t heard the word enough to automatically and accurately reproduce the tones and word. Guessing leads to a high chance of making a mistake.

Unfortunately, I haven’t heard the word enough and so I start making the same mistakes. Once a bad habit is established, its very hard to break. I found that if you don’t correct bad tones early on, your speaker eventually gets used to your bad tones and eventually won’t correct you. Practicing with another speaker will result in “Huh? I don’t understand”. The reason being that native speaker (A) has gotten used to your bad tones and can understand what you are saying within context and perhaps if they are your teacher know what you are saying by the vocabulary you have been taught. Native speaker (B) has not gotten used to your bad tones and will immediately not comprehend, and even in context may still not understand.

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.