Class Roundup: Cantonese

Cantonese is my second class to be done with and my only class this term to be half the units (3 instead of 6, to be transferred as 2.5 credits). In a roll of final assignments, the final examination was last Friday and the group presentation happened yesterday. I just got back a few hours ago from the optional dim sum lunch with the class, so I figured that now is as good a time as ever to blog about it, especially since I only need to proofread my last term paper (due Friday).

The final went better than expected. For the midterm I must have spent a few weeks studying for it, going over the vocabulary time and time again, to get 91%. For the final though, I had to allot my time tighter, so I ended up only spending a handful of hours over a day and a half to prepare. And I ended up with the same grade—91%. The one thing I noticed was the sheer number of tones I got right (most all of them).

I personally couldn’t care less about remembering words have what tones. There is just so much variation in the raw number of tones between speakers and locations, so all I aimed for was to be understood. In this aspect, I hoped to learn Cantonese much like a native speaker—trial and error, to just speak and see if I’m understood, to adjust my own sounds when I hear others say it differently. To this effect, I thought it was annoying that we had to remember the tones when we wrote down our Romanized Cantonese in the Jyutping system.

I got my final returned to me the day we had our group presentations in the form of skits. I paired myself with a German classmate, and I think we did pretty well. The week before, we had to submit our scripts for grading and correction, so Monday was when we got to perform our presentation from memory. Of course, the teacher allowed us to use our notes if necessary, because it’s better to be graded down rather than getting a zero mark. But my partner and I were the only group to not rely on our notes at all. Also a plus, our pronunciation was pretty good if I do say so myself, though I stuttered a few times.

Today, we had dim sum (點心) lunch at Star Seafood (明星海鮮餐廳). Though I’ve had my fair share of dim sum at Chinatowns back in the United States, this was only the second time I had gotten dim sum in Hong Kong, not including the one time I got it in Shenzhen.

I didn’t know most of the people at my table, mostly because the lunch was for all the Cantonese classes put together, but that was half the fun. At the end of it all, we took a picture with our Cantonese teacher and paid the bill. Four more classes to go!

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.