Mind your language – An Irishman’s Diary on learning Cantonese

Until I met, and later married, a native Hongkonger, I was never particularly Sinophile. I had a fondness for what small sample I had tried of the vast continent that is Chinese cuisine, and admired the work of a number of Chinese-speaking film directors, but my interest in Chinese culture, compared to that of other distant countries, was limited.

Moving to Hong Kong forced me to take a deeper interest and became the catalyst for my unlikeliest attempt on a language to date. There is no pressing need for foreigners here to learn Cantonese. English is by no means widely spoken in Hong Kong, but it remains an official language and is widespread enough for people to get by. But I decided to learn Cantonese for a number of reasons. One was communicating with my in-laws, few of whom speak English; another was negotiating everyday life in Hong Kong a little better (for one, you eat out a lot better if you have even a smattering of Cantonese) and also a curiosity to decipher the endless barrage of Chinese characters I encounter on a daily basis, and join up the dots in my knowledge.

Unless they happen to end up living in Hong Kong, Macau or Guangdong province on the Chinese mainland, the variety of Chinese most foreigners learn is unlikely to be Cantonese. Mandarin – or Putonghua (“common language”) as it is known over here – is more widely spoken and understood and will open far more doors in the Chinese-speaking world. Chinese people, particularly in the government, like to elide the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese by calling the latter a dialect but no serious linguist would consider it anything less than a separate, if closely related, language. It is no more a dialect of Mandarin than Scottish Gaelic is of Irish, or Catalan of Spanish.

All languages require effort to learn but western European ones – specifically Germanic and Romance – are fairly uncomplicated for English-speakers. They are, in the main, syntactically familiar and littered with recognisable vocabulary, leaving the learner with relatively few gaps to fill in as they go.

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'Si', depending on the intonation, can mean either 'city' or 'market', 'silk', 'use' or 'history'

Chinese, however, can be unforgiving. Everything is new to a western learner, with few frames of reference afforded, and the learning process involves familiarising oneself with large blocks of information, both visual and aural, and hoping that enough of it sticks. Quite often it doesn’t, and you soon find yourself back at square one trying to memorise the same information.

It doesn’t help either that, to the uninitiated, the written and the spoken appear to be completely independent of one another (though this is not, in fact, the fact). You are, in effect, learning two languages at once.

The spoken language does extend some favours – Chinese syntax, in all its variants, is straightforward, and not too different from English. Verbs are also uninflected so they exist only in the infinitive. This one form, with modifiers, can be used to describe all manner of things, from historical events of the Xia dynasty to your plans for lunch tomorrow.

I am unsure if I will ever learn Cantonese to any degree of fluency but, with my marital situation, I am at least better positioned than most foreigners to do so

It is the tones, however, that bedevil the learner. While Mandarin has only four, Cantonese has six (nine if you count interpolated sentence particles), and the meaning of words changes according to the tone. Therefore, “si”, depending on the intonation, can mean either “city” or “market”, “silk”, “use” or “history”.

This can appear odd and even unsporting to westerners but it is their languages that are in the minority worldwide – most languages are tonal and Asian ones overwhelmingly so. Native Cantonese-speakers are well aware of the difficulty – they themselves are wont to mistake tones when they speak Mandarin – and a complex web of wordplay exists in both languages that draws on the similarity in sounds across the tonal register.

A native ear is also capable of swiftly ironing out the ambiguity inherent in many a misplaced tone in everyday speech.

I am unsure if I will ever learn Cantonese to any degree of fluency but, with my marital situation, I am at least better positioned than most foreigners to do so. I can also take heart that I am, in however modest a way, participating in an effort to speak the language at a time when many in Hong Kong fear for its future, anxious that it will be engulfed by a wave of Mandarinisation in the education system and society as a whole (one of the vignettes in the 2015 dystopian film Ten Years featured a taxi driver in 2025 Hong Kong unable to get a job because of his lack of Mandarin).

It might seem strange that a language spoken by an estimated 80 million people would face such a precarious future, but there are already indications that Cantonese, in Guangdong, its province of origin, is being spurned by the younger generation, who prefer the Mandarin they have learned at school.

Casinos in Macau are also using signage in the mainland’s simplified Chinese script rather than the traditional characters used locally.

Hong Kong, a city keen to emphasise its difference to the motherland at every opportunity, is showing resistance to this, but that could all change with a generation or two who develop a greater allegiance for the supposedly more useful and “international” Mandarin. It is a situation that Irish people, conscious of the historic fate of their own language, would no doubt see every reason to be concerned about.