DMA1401L01 journey: Learning Cantonese
Reflection on Learning Cantonese
28 Oct, 2024
By: Sham Jo Yee
As someone who rarely speaks Chinese at home since secondary school and found my Chinese standard dropping day by day, taking up this course seemed daunting to me. I was introduced to this course by one of my friends. As we are both healthcare students, we found value in taking up this course and learning one of the popular spoken dialects in Singapore. My objective from this course was to develop a greater appreciation for Chinese dialects. Coming from a home that speaks Cantonese, I thought I would eventually learn how to speak Cantonese as I grew older. However, I never got the opportunity to do so and only managed to pick up some basic phrases such as "Do1 Ze6" and "Sik6 Baau2 Mei6". I never understood the conversations between my father and my Nai Nai, and often relied on translations by my grandmother.
During our first lesson, we learned the basics of Cantonese, which include basic greetings, numbers and general questions that would be useful if I were to visit Hong Kong. During our second lesson, we were taught common nouns and verbs. Our third lesson got more complex, with some sentence structuring involved. For example, "ngo5 kei4 zung1 jat1 go3 ngoi3 hou2 si6 tiu3 mou5", which translates to 我其中一个爱好是跳舞. Lesson 4 was a little more interesting as we learned about vegetables, how to describe taste, facial features and even medicines such as Aspirin (aa3 si6 pat1 ling4). In the fifth lecture, we learned words related to family, tableware and even parenting. The rest of the lectures were more Singapore-based, where we learned things related to Medisave, Pioneer generation package, Covid-19 vaccinations etc. There were also children
The following are 4 favourite Cantonese phrases that I learned throughout this course:
- dang2 nei5 dang2 dou3 geng2 dou1 coeng4 which is often used to describe waiting for someone who is late.
- sik6 dou3 lem2 lem2 lei6 which is used to describe delicious-tasting food. This is one of my favourite phrases as I could use it to describe my grandmother's homecooked meals.
- dung1 gwaa1 dau6 fu6 which refers to an unexpected unfortunate event. It's an interesting phrase that's unique to Cantonese! (no direct translation for it)
- Wi-Fi hai6 mai6 min5 fai3 which translates to "Is the Wi-Fi free?". This is especially useful if I travel to Hong Kong with my family as most of us cannot survive without the internet.
For our video submission 1, I worked with 2 other classmates and did a remix on 上海滩, one of the overplayed and well-known Cantonese songs to most people. The assignment was fun to work on and we managed to incorporate the phrases and words we learned during our lectures to create our own lyrics. (but of course, we had to get help from a Jyutping converter)
Overall this module greatly benefitted me in learning Cantonese basics. The phrases and sentences are useful in everyday context, such as speaking to my naai4 naai2, and would potentially benefit me in the future when I work in the healthcare setting. Thank you Loi Si for being so patient and entertaining during class, I truly enjoyed and looked forward to your Cantonese lessons every Monday! Em Goi Sai!
link to video interview: canto interview
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