On Thursday, we had our first Cantonese lesson with the Happy Jellyfish Cantonese school, just shy of
the Easter holidays (known here, phonetically, as ‘Fookwutsit’, which means ‘Back
to Life Festival’). We have our lessons in the Cantonese resto pictured here.
The early signs are that I am going to really enjoy learning Canto, because it is a) Grammatically very
simple and b) many sentences and phrases are incredibly literal. Here are my
early highlights:There are no tenses – you drink beer, you drink beer yesterday, you drink beer tomorrow.
You can often swap adjectives into sentences in place of verbs.
‘Aaaah’ is added on to the end of almost every sentence. It has no meaning at all, but acts as an oral full stop. Our teacher described it as ‘I can’t be arsed to say any more, it’s your turn to speak now’.
‘Ho’ is a catch all term for anything good, or numerous. So if in doubt you can just nod vigorously and say ‘Ho aaaaa’, and you’ll probably be fine. Alternatively, you can say ‘Ho Yeeeeh!’, which sounds pleasingly like shouting ‘ooooh yeah!’ but actually means ‘Good thing!’.
Absolute highlight came when the teacher was giving us clues in English on how to say things in Cantonese – e.g. Like a goat falling off a cliff (‘meeeh’, meaning ‘What kind of’); like a sheep charging into a bar (Beeeeear, meaning beer).
But the clue she gave for the phrase ‘how much’, was ‘homosexual entrance’. The answer she was after was ‘Gay door’. My suggestion was pretty wide of the mark, “Er…bum?”
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