Learning Cantonese - How I Went About It

hi there steve kaufman here um i did a

video on how i went about learning

japanese

uh which is someone asked for and now

someone has asked me to do a video on

how i went about learning cantonese

so here goes bear in mind that i lived

in hong kong from 68 to 70 two and a

half years

but my main task there was to learn

mandarin and then i worked in english

uh also my wife is a native speaker of

cantonese although she is

equally fluent in english and we have

always spoken english at home

however i heard cantonese

when i lived in hong kong and

every so often i would meet with my

wife's family members for

chinese dinner and i would hear a lot of

cantonese

and i could always say you know nehoma

and kato chen you know how how are you

how much money a few simple things like

that

however it is quite easy to live

surrounded by the la by a language and

simply not pay attention and not learn

it uh we see it all the time with

foreigners living in places like where i

have lived in hong kong or japan

because language learning as i always

say it comes down to

motivation time and then attentiveness

and i wasn't motivated to learn

cantonese i spent no time on it and i

wasn't really very attentive to what was

going on

this changed when about 11 years ago

for a variety of reasons

first of all i i was in a chinese

bookstore here and i happened to come

across a a series on on learning

cantonese

and i was leaving through it and it's

it's i have it here it's called

the it's called the musical approach to

learn cantonese published by novelty

publishers in hong kong

and there were two things in this set

that struck me not the musical approach

which made no sense to me at all but i'm

sure it works for some people

but he said two things in here he said

first of all that the tones in cantonese

or mandarin we have similar tones in

english and i think this is an important

point we use tones

for emphasis in sentences and we have

the same rising falling low middle high

tones that they have in cantonese and

the second thing he said was you don't

need nine tones part of the reason why i

was not motivated to learn cantonese

partly because i felt you know i've

learned the national language why do i

have to learn a regional language but

the second one was that everyone said

and particularly cantonese speakers

themselves would say it's very difficult

nine tones you can't learn it so here's

someone saying no there's only six tones

and he sort of illustrated the tones you

know low

flat

ah

low rising ah middle middle rising and

then high flat and then a falling down

and he numbered them from one to six

and

he had like in this thing here his

vocabulary bank he had

a bunch of of words where the characters

were there and of course i can read the

characters but it also had the uh

chinese

uh you know romanization call it with

the number of the tone so what i did

then was and so that was one thing that

happened the other thing that happened

was i became aware of the existence of a

thing called

minidisc players

and all of a sudden it was possible to

easily record people or record the radio

or any other source and carry this

around with you and store them so very

conveniently

and so these two things kind of get came

together at the same time so i went to

the chinese cultural center here in

vancouver and said can you please record

this book for me

uh my wife wouldn't do it we've uh we

are in english mostly so

uh

they recorded the characters like the

chinese the cantonese pronunciation and

i just spent a lot of time

a lot of time you can see that i've

marked it up in various places i spent a

lot of time listening and looking at it

because the whole trick is to get your

brain used to the

patterns of a new language in some cases

it's grammatical patterns in some cases

it's which words normally are used

together but in this case i had to get

my brain used to

what

certain chinese characters were when

pronounced

allah cantonese

so i started with this then i had other

people record stuff for me then i bought

every book i could find in the bookstore

and i re you know on learning cantonese

whatever there was as long as it

contained the audio

and the preferably the characters

although i probably had some that had no

characters but were possible with the

characters because i had to train my

brain to the cantonese sounds

with these chinese characters that i

already knew

so

within i would say two or three months i

was able to listen to the radio at first

with a lot of difficulty and of course

the disadvantage was that i didn't have

i didn't have transcripts for all this

stuff so it was more difficult than it

had to be you know we're going to

hopefully have cantonese at link and

then anyone can listen to it and can

read the can see the characters

but there were certain radio programs

that i really enjoyed and i would record

them on my mp3 player

uh there was a fellow called jiang mo

gay at one of the stations has a great

voice he's very entertaining to listen

to

and he says everything two or three

times it's his way of explaining he's

just one of these people that's a good

storyteller and a good explainer so i

would love listening to him

eventually i got to the point where i

could

call into these radio talk shows there

were two radio talk shows on

here on chinese radio two different

competing chinese radio stations they

were always on at five to six which is

when i was driving home so i would

listen to one or the other depending on

what the topic of conversation was

uh and i would record these again on my

mp3 player so pretty soon i had lots of

stuff to listen to not only while in the

car but while while you know exercising

or or doing anything else

and incidentally once on this one of

these talk shows they had a

they had invited raymond chan who was a

a federal politician a chinese-canadian

federal politician in fact a minister of

the government

and he was the representative for

richmond which is where i bought this

book by the way an area which has about

chinese residents

and um

so his he was on there saying you know

we chinese we must vote for chinese

because that way we'll have more power

as chinese

and everyone else does it and and he's

he's of course

he plays his whole multi-cultural card

here you know

which is where the ethnic groups try to

get the government to pay attention to

them not because they're a voter or a

worker or uh you know whatever other

interest taxpayer that they might have

pay attention to him as chinese

so that he wants that then he feels

would give him a lot of power and he

used the example of how the sikhs at the

time of the liberal party leadership

convention they threw their weight

entirely behind one candidate

jean-chretien who became prime minister

and as a result the sikhs in the form of

herb dollywall their leader they now

control all federal spending in british

columbia of course all of that is

nonsense but he's using that to try to

persuade people to vote for him so i

phone in

and i say you know that really doesn't

make a lot of sense because

you know we would never have a chinese

canadian

member of parliament if they rely only

on the chinese vote you've also got to

get your vote from other people and if

you're appealing to your chinese