Ngo5 hai6 Hoeng1 Gong2 Dai6 Hok6 ge3 hok6 saang1

So I started realizing about a month ago that I haven't been writing that much about class. So here I'll start.

First up is Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1. Ideally, I've found that for learning languages, practice every day (or at least five days a week) works wonders for subconciously memorizing vast amounts of vocabulary and complex grammatical patterns. Unfortunately, my Cantonese class meets on Mondays and Thursdays for an hour each time. We cover a lot, but the fact that we don't repeat what we learn in class means that I have to study a lot more outside of class.

It's stuctured as we're given material and accomopanying homework than tested on it twice in the semester. So far we've covered the usual topics: acoomodation, self-introduction, money, time, and greetings. And for what we've learned (combined with what I learn myself) I've fared well. In going out of the country I use Cantonese at immigration (though by Hong Kong law I am entitled to use English if I so choose), I manage to hop of minibuses with ease, and ask for directions frequently when infrequently I get lost.

In addition, we have two presentations to deal with. The latter is a group project which we have not yet started. The former is a memorized self-introduction with a minimum of 100 character-syllabes delievered to the class. This self-introduction happened on Friday, right before I departed for Taipei, and by all regards it went well.

I had my speech memorized to the point where I left the script at my dorm that most would use for last-minute review and preparation. I thought I would miss a fair number of tones, but I knew I had all of the phonetic sounds down. The only thing I was lacking was confidence, because while I have little trouble speaking in front of large groups of people, strange as they may be, I've never done so in a foreign language (except in other foreign language classes), and in such a foreign foreign language.

But it went well. With speech not in hand, I delievered it smoothly and confidently. Part of it (bless them for their effort though in learning Cantonese), many of the other students were so poor. Many focused more on the tones than the sounds of the words. Entire consonants were missing as vowels were made to sound overly contrived and highly awkward.

And here's where I get into the nitty gritty of this class. To start things off, when I was learning bits and pieces of Cantonese (never enough to be fluent) from my mother when I was younger, I had already gone through two non-consecutive years of Chinese (Mandarin) school. I was always told that I sounded better in Mandarin than in Cantonese, and in a way that inhibited me from going too much farther.

But in a way, I have something of a natural ability to kind of pick up languages—and whereas everyone honestly does or did, I never seem to have truly lost mine. When speaking Spanish or French, I can go sentences at a time without people thinking i'm a non-native speaker. One woman in France asked me what district of Paris I was from, need I reiterate.

So now in taking Cantonese class here, hearing a native Cantonese speaker speak twice weekly, I find myself sounding more and more native, less and less stilted every day—which is good albeit expected, since the same thing happened to me when I took that year of Mandarin in my last year of high school.

I don't know how nitty gritty I can get into this here for sake of losing eyes, but I'll go so far as to say that we use the Jyutping system in class. Most of the vowels used don't correspond to English, though the consonants do, so go look it up in a book or online. But for the tones, we use six in the class (though some scholars have counted up to a dozen). Basically the first (1) is high-level, the second (2) is high rising, the third (3) is mid-level, the fourth (4) is mid-low falling, fifth (5) is low falling then rising, and sixth (6) is low-level.

So if you speak Cantonese, the sentence "Ngo5 hai6 Hoeng1 Gong2 Dai6 Hok6 ge3 hok6 saang1" means I am a Hong Kong University student."

More to come.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
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