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VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话

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vox nihili:

--- Quote from: Joseph41 on June 19, 2019, 04:48:47 pm ---Are you still using (or intend to use) Complete Cantonese, mostly?

--- End quote ---

Yep! Has been a really useful book. Also hoping to use my Cantonese grammar to extend a bit more too. One of the major frustrations with complete Cantonese is that it doesn't really give you a lot, so by teaching myself a little bit more complicated grammar around the topics I do in complete Cantonese, I'm hoping my speaking will develop a little more quickly.
Have also been practising with the ole GF a bit as well!

vox nihili:

--- Quote from: vox nihili on June 18, 2019, 10:58:23 am ---好耐冇写 !

Cracking out the defibrillator and reviving this thread. As I'm sure will surprise none of you, progress with my Cantonese dropped off as things got a bit busier; however, the plan is to get cracking again over the next few weeks as I'll be off to Hong Kong at the end of July! A lot of work between here and then to regain where I was up to and hopefully extend beyond that!

--- End quote ---

I ended up doing a couple of winter subjects, so the progress I'd hoped to make with book study before I headed off to Hong Kong just didn't happen. If anything, I'm actually further behind where I got to and when I do pick things up again will probably need to do a lot of revision.

Despite the fact I haven't done any study for, let's be honest, months now, my Cantonese fared surprisingly well in Hong Kong. A lot of the exposure I've had recently has been outside an academic context, so I haven't been learning anything academically, but have probably refined my listening skills quite a lot. When I got over there, I was genuinely quite shocked by how much I could engage with. In particular, when my friend's parents were firing questions about me, I was able to understand what they were saying most of the time (which freaked them the fuck out when I nodded along because they didn't know I could understand some canto). It was a really odd experience tbh, like having skills that I didn't know I had?

My friend was always with me while I was over there, so I always had a bit of a safety blanket if I needed to talk to people. I managed a few basic interactions with people (buying things, getting chopsticks when they gave me a fucking knife and fork). I also managed to haggle with someone in Canto, which was kind of cool and a little bit of an odd personal goal (I'd wanted to go to 女人街, a market in HK, to haggle but it was closed because of the fkn typhoon).

As an aside, my Cantonese has become a little muddled in the last couple of weeks, as I spent a week in Taiwan after Hong Kong. My Mandarin is pretty bad, and I only managed a few basic things (although could read helpful things at times, such as the whack toilet), but it's meant that I'm mixing characters in Cantonese and Mandarin at times which is super annoying.

Bonus: enjoy a song about learning Cantonese

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