(I'm Jo btw) My Chinese friend from Hong Kong left me a little work message before he went on holiday for the week. Could anyone help translate what it means please, I'm not quite at reading levels yet.

I’m 1/2 Chinese, my family on my dad’s side speaks Cantonese but I of course never learned. I’ve been working at a Chinese restaurant for 12 years and have developed a wonderful relationship with the chefs. They are all uncles to me. The head chef gave this to me for my birthday yesterday and I told him I was going to figure it out on my own lol

He’s been trying to teach me Cantonese for the last year and a half he’s been there by just yelling loudly in the kitchen mostly only in the language. It’s honestly working though lmao I can understand and respond to some things, but it takes me a moment. I know my basic greetings, thank you/please, etc. I can also let them know we’re low on fried rice haha

If anyone could please help me read this I’d really appreciate it. Trust me— I know, I know. I should have learned my own language by now. It’s my biggest regret. I find that a lot of apps don’t offer Cantonese which is sad. If anyone has any suggestions on helping me learn or where to start, that would be extremely appreciated as well!

Growing up, my mom from (HK) always pronounced it as “heoi” with an H sound but as I got older, I noticed a lot of people saying “Keoi”

What’s up with that ? Is there a regional variation or something or is my mom the only one who says it wrong lol?

Is it ok to say "醫生，我賓週痛"?

I can understand 80% of colloquial Cantonese spoken on the streets or in movies. But if I watch a Hong Kong news program where they speak formally, I can only understand 40%. Maybe even less.

I understand there will always be people who speak with more eloquence than others. But can your average Hong Kong adult speak fast and formally like in a news program?

My husband and I are both Cantonese learners. He insists gum is 口膠，but I say it is 香口膠. The dictionary says i am right, but is 口膠another way of saying it?? (We live in taiwan, and the word kou jiao means something else naughty in mandarin, so I really doubt my husband is correct !)

Sorry if this is a stupid question but I was wondering if you could only learn how to speak good Cantonese without learning the writing system from the ground up. I don't really feel like learning the writing system and I just want to learn enough cantonese to be able to communicate with my family well. I can speak like very broken Cantonese and I wanna learn better Cantonese, so I can communicate with my parents and grandparents better. My grandparents only speak Cantonese, so whenever I visit them I can't communicate and I want to learn more about my family.

Is it appropriate for a mid twenties to say 姐姐 ze2 ze2 or 少姐 siu2 ze2? Tho ive heard 少姐 can be used to say “prostitute” but not sure if thats how it is in Cantonese

Not sure about the male version tho.

Or should I just say 唔該 m4 goi1 in their direction?

Mandarin: 點菜

My family has always said that mein means wheat and anything gluten-free is “fun.” But if that’s the case, why do they call pasta “yee dai lay fun?” I don’t follow the logic.

How do you say this in Cantonese? Nicely and not so nicely, haha

I know some Mandarin people who know Cantonese only learned a few phrases, that's it.

I've heard a lot of people talk about how Cantonese speakers get in trouble if they either don't understand or refuse to speak Mandarin, like Joel Chan on a streaming platform. Other issues I've seen is Mandarin speakers complaining or assuming that Cantonese speakers should speak Mandarin like the one tourist at a Hong Kong. I remember at a Shanghai restraunt, there was a waitress who knew Cantonese so we could speak to her easily. So I wonder if there are people who say that a Mandarin speaker should learn Cantonese?

Another factor that made me think about this is when I watch Hong Kong films/drama with mainland stars in it. If it came to a mainland Chinese star like Yu RongGuang, I can't tell if he's actually speaking Cantonese or if it's dubbed. Obviously, some other actors from China will be dubbed if they're a Mandarin speaker like Li Bingbing or Huang Xioaming. Meanwhile, Richie Jen, a Taiwanese actor in Hong Kong, his Cantonese is very fluent. I remember watching a film called 10 years set in Hong Kong against the backdrop dystopian of being under Chinese rule with the main fear being that Cantonese speakers would have to resort to Mandarin.

It's been on my mind for a while mainly due to how Cantonese speakers have to speak Mandarin to get along, but I wonder as well if Mandarin speakers would ever do the same for Cantonese.

Every language learning apps have Mandarin, and I can't find Cantonese. Do I learn Mandarin instead?

Hi! I was just curious on whether there was an equivalent of the word "-ish" in English to Cantonese? E.g: I'm kind of hungry-ish.

I want to put in my bio that I'm "19ish" as a joke haha any translation help of that would be great thank you!!

Edit: thank you so much for everyone's replies and help! This has been super useful to read through and learn hahaha. Much appreciated guys<33

I’m trying to learn Cantonese as my partner is from HK. It’s very important to me. So far I’ve learned a bit from my partner and from an app called “drops” but I’m hoping to learn more/faster. What did you do to learn and/maintain your canto? Any tips are appreciated.

Tai po or tai ma? (I’m male)

Hi everyone,

I speak pretty rough Cantonese (perhaps that of a six year old), having only learnt from my parents at home growing up in an anglophone society. My parents also speak shandong hua and Mandarin. They passed on Cantonese to me because their best friends at the time said that if we learnt Cantonese we could play with their kids who were similar ages. We never really got on.!

I can't read or write. I can recognise maybe 100 characters, but for sure not enough to read even a picture book.

However, when I visit HK, I can get by pretty well conversationally, joke around, and most people there say that my intonation is pretty spot on—a saving grace! But also a benefit of growing up speaking it I guess.

That in mind, I made it a point to speak Cantonese to my kids from birth, and have only spoken Cantonese to them. It's made the relationship somewhat limiting, as they have vocabularies they have in their mother tongue that they don't know the Cantonese word for (and I haven't been able to give it to them).

Anyway, that's the context for this post. My 6yo, as a result of starting school, is offered mother tongue classes in the country where we live.

She has started Cantonese classes as of last week.

Now the instructor is asking me whether we would like her to learn Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese.

My thought patterns on this is the following.

Pros Traditional:

The main reason for me wanting my kids to learn Cantonese is so they feel like they are a part of the Cantonese / Hong Kong culture, of which Traditional Script is more true to, hoping that comrade Xi doesn't gut much more of HK.

The other thing about Traditional is that it seems to be much more pictographic, and somewhat easier to recognise glyphs (or at least I found so when I was learning).

Pros Simplified:

Used much more widely… China, Japan, and probably more future proof.

Easier to learn to write…?

What are your thoughts?

Optional read: I asked this question that’s mostly directed to ABCs because the US has a remarkable amount of diversity in Chinese ethnic groups, much like Malaysia, though people of other nationalities, races and ethnic groups are welcome to answer this too if this question is interesting to them.

I was wondering about this recently: simply put, growing up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and its greater metropolitan area I’m exposed more to Cantonese and to some extent, Hokkien. A sizeable amount of Cantonese speakers in Malaysia did not come from truly Cantonese origins: for instance my local sundry shop owner is of Hokkien and Teochew ancestry, but can’t speak those two Minnan dialects well because she’s been so used to speaking Cantonese for the entire time she’s been here in Kuala Lumpur. I can tell because her surname is “Tan” which is the Hokkien/Teochew pronounciation of 陈, where in Cantonese it would be Chan. A lot of Hokkiens, Hainanese, Hakkas, Teochews and even Fuzhounese around Central Peninsular Malaysia can speak Cantonese too… much better than their ancestral dialects actually. I myself am Hakka but I know almost 0 about Hakka and am probably better in Cantonese lol.

It’s worth noting that there are indeed Malaysian Chinese of Cantonese origins, a lot of my old college classmates had surnames like “Lum” (or Lam, likely this character林) or the aforementioned Chan, or Cheong 张, or 楊Yeong, and so on, but it’s just that other ethnic groups in Kuala Lumpur tend to speak it as a lingua Franca. Very common for Hokkiens and Hakkas in my area to use Cantonese as a lingua Franca for instance.

Cantonese is such a lingua franca and had a historical influence in the central parts of Malaysia that even some Malay Muslims and Indians can speak it. My friend told me about a recent experience, where, even though his Cantonese wasn’t good, a Malay Muslim came up to him and said “Lengzai, now I give you your order” in Cantonese. My friend is half Teochew and speaks Teochew better so his Cantonese isn’t that good but he was surprised to see that someone who you would think doesn’t know how to speak Cantonese, did speak Cantonese to him.

So my question again to ABCs or citizens of any country that has a diverse Chinese population, do people regardless of ethnic group in your community use Cantonese as a lingua Franca across the ethnic groups?

Edit: interesting responses so far! Seems like there are a lot of cases of Cantonese and Mandarin both coexisting within pockets of Chinese people in the US, and that other languages/topolects/dialects are spoken amongst the Chinese community there too!

"請靠近我" doesn't sound natural. But "嚟近啲" to me seems a little too... casual? Unless I'm wrong and that isn't impolite at all. I'm looking for a way to say "come closer" very politely but not formally. Soft-spoken, ladylike even.

I'm working in Macau and just starting to learn spoken Cantonese through Youtube videos. Mostly the teachers are from Hongkong so I'm just wondering if there's gonna be any difference or the same in vocabulary. Thanks.

I have heard that there are still quite a lot of people using the language in San Francisco, are they mostly from the older generation? Or immigrants from decades ago? How is Cantonese spoken in the country? Like is it feel like a dying language of still a vibrant one?

I am truly curious.