Hanyu 汉语 Hànyǔ

Cantonese courses in Hong Kong are surprisingly few, despite it being the main language of daily communication in Hong Kong and spoken by over 90% of inhabitants. Fortunately, a number of new schools/companies are appearing that offer Cantonese courses in Hong Kong.

If you are new (or not so new) and want to learn Cantonese in Hong Kong, this short list will help you find a suitable course.

The Cantonese courses offered by the non-profit YMCA are probably the best deal price wise. There are 3 levels and the cost works out to just HK$50 per classroom hour. Here is a link to a pdf with the information.

The HKLLC is “a leading language school in Hong Kong which specialises in Cantonese and Mandarin Learning programmes in conversation and Chinese Reading and Writing for expatriates, locals and overseas Chinese”.

There is not much concrete information on the website, despite quite a few links. To learn how much their courses actually cost, you need to send an email. It took me around an hour to receive a reply.

They have both intensive and short term courses. The intensive 40 session course has lessons from M to F and consists of a 50-minute teaching hour, a 50-minute conversation hour, and an extra 1 hour language lab. The Course Fee is HK$8,200- (material fee included).

The short term 10 session Cantonese course is identical to the intensive in its format. The Course Fee is HK$2,300- (material fee included)

Because it’s not clear how much of the course fee should be allowed for the language lab, we can only come up with a rough figure of around HK$100 per hour for the HKLLC course.

The CUHK offers Cantonese evening courses for Non-native Chinese Speakers at 3 levels. These courses are 40 sessions held twice weekly. Each session is from 19.00 - 20.50. Here is a link to a pdf with information on the CUHK’s Cantonese courses.

EDC Languages, located in Admiralty, offers both private (From HK$155 – HK$190 per 45 minutes) and group Cantonese lessons. The group course fee is HK$2,940 for 30 hours, (Rate Per Hour HK$98), HK$3,680 fort 40 hours, (Rate Per Hour HK$92) and HK$5,280 (Rate Per Hour HK$88).

The Global Language Centre, located in Central, on Des Voeux Rd has private Cantonese classes for from HK$155-187/Hour and group classes (2-3 learners) for from HK$90-110. The fees vary according to when you study. It’s slightly cheaper during the day than in the evening.

The Hong Kong Language Training Centre offers Cantonese classes ranging from HK$250-/per hr/per class for 1-2 students for 24 or above hrs. to HK$330-/per hr/per class for 5 students and over. There are other rates for fewer students and fewer hours.

You can find HKLTC’s prices here for their Cantonese immersion courses with rates in USD.

Here is a link to a pdf with information on the International Language Centre’s Cantonese courses. Tuition per student for a 36 hour course is HK$4320 for the Beginner Level and HK$4520 for the Intermediate Course.

The Hong Kong Institute of Languages, located in Central, offers a 10 week, 20 hour Foundation course in Cantonese. The course fee ranges from HK$2,388 - HK$ 2,988, depending on the number of students and the time offered. The HKIL also teaches Cantonese courses for companies, schools, teens and children.

Chinese Language Professional gives information on their Chinese language courses here. There is only a price for an Intermediate Cantonese Course - a 36 hours Conversation Course for HK$5,398 and a 48 hour Conversation, Reading and Writing Course for HK$6,698.

The Talking Mandarin Language Centre, in spite of their name, also teach Cantonese. To get their rates, however, you’ll need to fill out an online form and give them your mobile number.

This charity has Cantonese courses for “ethnic minorities”. You will have to figure out if you fit in this category. Here is their brochure.

http://www.christian-action.org.hk/cdp/Lang_Prog_leaflet_Eng.pdf

You do?

Think again! Unless you take the time to understand the politics and ideologies surrounding speaking and learning Cantonese, you may find the difficulties of actually using the language far outweigh any linguistic structural complexities. As this abstract to an academic paper suggests, whether or not anybody will appreciate your attempts at learning the language largely depends on traditional sociological categories like race and class.

Anyway, academics aside, here are 5 reasons why learning Cantonese could be a bad choice and not worth the hassle:

1. Cantonese is only a “dialect” - not a “real language” like Mandarin.

Cantonese doesn’t receive the same respect as Mandarin because it’s not an official or national language. Speaking a local “dialect” like Cantonese tends to mark group solidarity and in-group status. If you are white, or visible “non-Chinese-looking”, like it or not, you’re probably not going to qualify for in-group status unless you have a local spouse, significant other or somebody else to make you appear more “in-like”.

In Hong Kong, the language of power, wealth and prestige is English. English, then, and to a lesser degree, Mandarin, are perceived as the languages of opportunity. If you want to show that you are educated, you speak English. It’s no coincidence that fierce political battles have raged in Hong Kong (and still do) over the medium of instruction in secondary schools there ever since 1997 when the Hong Kong Government introduced mother tongue instruction.

Teaching Cantonese as a Second/Foreign Language is, given the political climate, hardly a priority. It’s not surprising that it’s difficult to find decent Cantonese learning materials and Cantonese language classes in Hong Kong. Some native Cantonese speakers may discourage you from learning Cantonese, insisting that it is uncultured and primitive and too difficult for outsiders (especially white ones) and offer you little help when you try to learn it. Because of its low status, some speakers in Hong Kong will refuse to speak to you in Cantonese and either reply in English or ignore your initial attempts at speaking it. Here are some experiences of an Australian learning Cantonese.

Ironically, if you “look Asian” in Hong Kong, you’ll more likely be expected to speak Cantonese, or somehow acquire it through osmosis. So, if you were born in Elliott Lake, had great-great-great grandparents from Toi San and can’t use chopsticks, or don’t have a clue what a tone sounds like, that trip back to the “Old Country” to trace your roots and learn Cantonese could be a tough slog.

Wanna learn Chinese? Er, go learn Mandarin!

2. No officially recognized romanization system

Whereas Mandarin has “pinyin”, there is no equivalent official romanization system for Cantonese. Although the Yale system is found in most materials for foreigners, no Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong (apart from a few Cantonese teachers) would have a clue how to read or write Yale. The same can be said for Jyutping, an alternative system to Yale which uses numbers to mark tones and can also be used as a computer input method for Cantonese, as well as the system used by the Hong Kong Government.

Cantonese learners who cannot already read Chinese characters are at a distinct disadvantage because they are forced to rely on their textbook and dictionary. It is difficult for the beginner to learn from her surroundings because everything is either written in Chinese or in inconsistent ad hoc systems that are unhelpful for serious learners. Even Hong Kong surnames and place names are anglicized so that the romanized spellings are inconsistent and unhelpful for the learner. When a Cantonese speaker is speaking English, Cantonese names are pronounced as if they were English. All these factors converge to give an English-speaking outsider the feeling of being shielded or protected from having to deal with Cantonese. There is rarely any expectation that she should bother learning Cantonese - despite its status as the language of the majority in Hong Kong.

3. Cantonese is dying out

That’s what they said in the LA Times article Cantonese is Losing its Voice. In North American (and probably other) Chinatowns Cantonese is mostly spoken by older people. New immigrants tend to speak Mandarin and young ethnic Chinese born overseas are learning Mandarin because of the economic and professional benefits. It is also “discouraged” (read “banned”) in Singapore, where Mandarin and English are actively promoted by the government. Now that more Hongkongers are going to Mainland China for business and work, they are also learning Mandarin. If you want to learn Chinese, it will be far more practical to learn Mandarin than learn Cantonese. And, anyway, [see 5. below] “everybody speaks English in Hong Kong”.

4. The everyday spoken language is not directly related to the way it’s written.

Cantonese uses a number of nonstandard characters not found in Mandarin and which may be omitted from Chinese dictionaries. Whereas it is possible to write in Cantonese, rather than Standard Written Chinese, the practice is frowned on and highly stigmatized.

The lack of an official romanization system mentioned above, and the negative attitude towards (especially) white Westerners speaking/learning it one frequently encounters, means you’re on your own if you decide to learn the language.

5. In Hong Kong everybody speaks English

So, you don’t need to learn Cantonese! This is really not true, but it’s a common myth. It may feel like it when you first arrive in Hong Kong. Frequent high-end department stores and shopping centres and it will mostly be true. Furthermore, if you are an expat with a high salary and good job, you will be surrounded by English-speaking Cantonese anxious to show you that Hong Kong is “Asia’s World City” where the outsider can get along in English and need not go to the trouble of learning the local “dialect”.

But venture off the beaten track, you will realize that it’s just not true that “everybody in Hong Kong speaks English”. Nevertheless, the belief that they do is a big part of the popular ideology and essential to branding Hong Kong as a modern, democratic “world city”. Assuming you are white and English-speaking, by trying to learn Cantonese, you are basically trying to turn the world upside down as it’s understood by many Hongkongers.

In case you didn’t guess, I don’t think the above should deter you from learning Cantonese. I hope it doesn’t! While you will surely often encounter negative attitudes, you might be lucky enough to meet a bunch of great Cantonese people who are really happy you want to learn their language and will do everything to help you. I hope you do!

But, if you run into problems and get frustrated and discouraged, understanding the politics of learning Cantonese may put things in perspective. As Linguist Carol Edelsky noted in her paper Not Acquiring Spanish as a Second Language: The Politics of Second Language Acquisition, majority language speakers usually do not acquire the minority languages in their community. Edelsky found that Anglo first graders in a bilingual Spanish Program in Arizona failed to learn that language. She concluded that the classroom situation reflected the more general relative political position of Spanish and English in the outside world. A similar situation surely exists for Cantonese in Hong Kong. As many native English speakers find, it can be a struggle to position oneself in the role of a learner of Cantonese when the expectation is that English speakers are teachers of their own language and Cantonese speakers are the learners of English.

In Part 2 of this article I’ll give a few ideas about what kinds of people in Hong Kong will be most likely to appreciate your interest in learning Cantonese and suggestions for dealing with speakers who want to speak English when you want to practice Cantonese.

I haven’t got around to posting much here lately. I’ve been putting most of the Cantonese stuff into the free online Moodle course at http://cantonesecourse.com . I love WordPress - but it wasn’t designed for learning.

Eventually I’ll have all the 50+ dialogues from the 15 lessons of Cantonese FSI Volume 1 made into YouTube videos. To date I’ve managed to churn out over 20 of them. No claims that these are great videos - just a modest attempt at experimenting with materials for learning a neat language online.

Hate these rather crass and vulgar efforts at “edutainment” a la YouTube? Question their pedagogical value? Never mind - you can always just download the .zip of the dialogues as mp3s.

Dialogue 1

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Dialogue 2

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Dialogue 3

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Dialogue 4

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Dialogue 5

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Dialogue 6

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Dialogue 7

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Learn Cantonese Book 1, published by Hanyu Press, is now available as a free .pdf.
Learn Cantonese Book 1 contains transcripts in traditional Chinese characters, Yale Romanization and English translation for all the approximately 60 dialogues in lessons 1-15 (originally from the FSI’s Cantonese: Basic Course, Volume 1). It also contains vocabulary lists and a Cantonese - English Glossary. Finish the 15 lessons in Learn Cantonese Book 1 and you should know around 600 of the most basic and daily words and expressions in Cantonese.

Free pdf of the book and mp3 audio files for all dialogues can be downloaded from http://cantonesecourse.com

The paperback will be out soon!

This is Lesson 4 in our Learn Cantonese Video Course with simple everyday dialogues. Mr Wong goes to visit a young lady friend (Chan Siuje) in Mong Kok and practices his Cantonese.

Here is the dialogue in traditional Chinese characters, Yale Cantonese romanization, and the English translation:
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I’m not interested in American politics. Quite frankly, I’m with Stanley Bing at Fortune China. Stanley wrote a piece in Chinese entitled 乔已经够多了 (I’ve had enough of Joe).

Me, too.

On a bad day, I’d be less polite and 叫阿祖食屎!

But, like it not, the US is having an election and the rest of the world has little choice but to watch - if not react.

So, how to turn all this into a positive learning experience?
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This is is the third in a series of Cantonese learning videos with simple everyday dialogues. Sound files were extracted and recycled from the US Foreign Service Institute’s (FSI) Basic Cantonese 1. Avatars were made with CrazyTalk. Photos of Hong Kong are distributed under a Creative Commons licence and/or GNU. Songs are copyright of various copyright holders. Everything else is public domain.

In Lesson 3, you learn how to say the names of several languages in Cantonese and ask who speaks which language. Mr Hak, an American visitor, meets a local lady in Mong Kok and practices his Cantonese.

(BTW, the Deng Lijun song is in Hokkien - not Cantonese.)

Here is the dialogue in traditional Chinese characters, Yale Cantonese romanization, and the English translation:

A: 李生識係識講日本話呀?
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This is the second in a series of Cantonese learning videos with simple everyday dialogues. Sound files were extracted and recycled from the US Foreign Service Institute’s (FSI) Basic Cantonese 1. Avatars were made with CrazyTalk. Photos of Hong Kong are distributed under a Creative Commons licence and/or GNU. Everything else is public domain.

In Lesson 2, Mr Ho takes a leisurely evening stroll through the streets of Mong Kok, meets a pretty young lady and asks her her name.

Here is the transcript in Yale Romanization, traditional Chinese and English translation.

Síujé gwaising a?
Ngóh sing Chàhn. Sīnsàang gwaising a?
Síusing Hòh. Chàhn síujé haih m̀hhaih Gwóngdùngyàhn a?
M̀hhaih a. Ngóh haih Seuhnghóiyàhn. Néih nē?
Néih haih m̀hhaih Méihgwokyàhn a?
Haih a. Ngóh haih Méihgwokyàhn.

小姐貴姓呀?
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This is the first in a series of Cantonese learning videos with simple everyday dialogues. Sound files were extracted and recycled from the US Foreign Service Institute’s (FSI) Basic Cantonese 1. Photos of Sham Shui Po are distributed under a Creative Commons licence and/or GNU. Everything else is public domain.

Two acquaintances on their way to computer parts in scenic Sham Shui Po bump into each other outside the Golden Computer Centre.

Here is the transcript in Yale Romanization, traditional Chinese and English translation.

A: Hòh Sàang, jóusàhn.
B: Léih Táai, jóusàhn.
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 Flash Video: Play in Popup | Download