http://www.due-east.org Wed, 28 Sep 2011 05:54:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 http://www.due-east.org/2011/06/09/chengdu-living-five-must-see-websites-to-advance-your-chinese/ http://www.due-east.org/2011/06/09/chengdu-living-five-must-see-websites-to-advance-your-chinese/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 08:17:59 +0000 Due-East http://www.due-east.org/?p=658   Chengdu Living just posted an article entitled Five Must-See Websites to Advance Your Chinese. If your Chinese has become stagnant, why not check it out?   ]]>     Chengdu Living just posted an article entitled Five Must-See Websites to Advance Your Chinese. If your Chinese has become stagnant, why not check it out?   ]]> http://www.due-east.org/2011/06/09/chengdu-living-five-must-see-websites-to-advance-your-chinese/feed/ 1 http://www.due-east.org/2009/10/21/top-10-reasons-to-learn-cantonese/ http://www.due-east.org/2009/10/21/top-10-reasons-to-learn-cantonese/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:29:49 +0000 Due-East http://www.due-east.org/2009/10/21/top-10-reasons-to-learn-cantonese/ a New York Times article about how Cantonese is slowly dying out in New York’s Chinatown. I couldn’t help but get a little sad reading it. Sure, it’s a ridiculously difficult [...]]]>  
The awesomeness that is Hong Kong: Reason enough to learn Cantonese.   A friend of mine just sent me a link to a New York Times article about how Cantonese is slowly dying out in New York’s Chinatown. I couldn’t help but get a little sad reading it. Sure, it’s a ridiculously difficult language to learn (which is why it should be spelled Can’t-onese), but it’s also an amazingly interesting language brimming with character. So, here I make my case for why people should try to learn it in addition to Mandarin. Here you are: My top 10 reasons to learn Cantonese!   Reason 1: The Wow Factor – As I said above, Cantonese is ridiculously difficult. Nobody seems to agree on exactly how many tones it has. Some people say 7. Some say 9. And some say over 11, referencing so-called silent tones. Sorry, but if it’s silent, it’s not a tone. But the insistence on the existence of these so-called silent tones only ups the ‘cool factor’ of Cantonese. If you can master it, you’re pretty much an unstoppable language learning force. Native speakers will lavish you with praise, giving your self-esteem a temporary boost (at least until you say something wrong and get made fun of. See reason number 8). And also, I’ll be really jealous of you.   Reason 2: The Pronunciation – Mandarin pronunciation requires more precision than Cantonese. To speak Mandarin fluently and quickly, you have to train your tongue to make some pretty drastic motions in rapid succession. Cantonese, on the other hand, makes heavy use of the throat, and some words you don’t even really have to open your mouth to pronounce correctly. How cool is that?   Reason 3: The Slang – Cantonese is chock-full-o-slang and plays-on-words. Because there are 7 (or 9 or 11 or 7.5 billion or whatever) tones in Cantonese and because of the way the tones work, there are gobs of opportunities to coin new slang terms because so many words sound exactly like other words in every way, save for the pitch of the tone. It’s kind of like singing a word on an A instead of an A-flat changing the meaning of the word entirely. Yes, it’s hard, but don’t think about that…it’s also super cool.   Reason 4: The Particles – This is probably the coolest thing about Cantonese. There are tons of particles that native speakers slap on to the ends of sentences to stress emotion, and it sounds just plain cool. You know you’ve heard it in movies or on the streets: “something-something-something aaaaaaaahhh…something-something gaaalaaaaaahhh….something-something-something waaaahhhhh.” Total. Awesomeness. I swear, if I could can that and sell it, I’d be a rich man.   Reason 5: Hong Kong Movies – If you like Chinese movies, especially older ones, then you’ll enjoy them more after learning Cantonese. Let’s face it, sometimes subtitles don’t convey the same meaning as the spoken dialogue. So if you can learn enough Cantonese to follow along with the actors on the screen, you’ll enjoy Hong Kong movies more. Plus, remember the slang and plays-on-words? Yep, you’ll get a lot more of the jokes if you understand Cantonese.   Reason 6: The Music – If you’re a music lover like I am, learning Cantonese in addition to Mandarin (or any other language you may learn) will just open up that much more music to you. And who doesn’t want more music to listen to? Pretty much only deaf people. And maybe people who don’t like music, but I can’t understand that kind of person, so I don’t expect them to understand why I like Cantonese and thus don’t expect them to read this post.   Reason 7: The Food – Cantonese food is good. There’s a huge variety of tasty dishes to choose from, all full of flavor. Most are relatively tame, so you unadventurous people should be ok. But Cantonese food has those of you who like to try eating things you can’t quite identify but obviously came out of some animal’s nether regions covered as well. There’s something for everybody!   Reason 8: The Humility – Feel like you’ve got a problem with pride? Looking down on other people? Try learning Cantonese! Unless you have perfect pitch and unparalleled language learning abilities, you’re going to speak incorrectly. A lot. And you’ll get laughed at. Often. And may never be told why. And getting laughed at without intentionally being funny is a really good way to keep yourself humble.   Reason 9: Preserving Culture – I’ve heard that Cantonese is much more closely related to ancient Chinese than Mandarin is, so for you cultural purists out there, Cantonese is a good way to go.   Reason 10: Widening Your Horizons – Technically, this applies just as much to Mandarin as it does Cantonese, but this post isn’t about Mandarin, so let’s pretend Mandarin doesn’t exist for now. Learning another language is a great way to widen your horizons. Every culture has some distinct ways of thinking that other cultures just don’t have, and Westerners could stand to learn a lot about loyalty, hard work, and thrift from the Chinese.   Extra reason: To Get a Date – I hate to resort to this because I think learning another language for the purpose of getting a date is the epitome of lame (actually creepy), unless you’re doing it for the sake of impressing someone that you’re already interested in regardless of his or her cultural background, in which case it’s sort of romantic, so go with it. But in the interests of getting more people to learn Cantonese, I’ll go ahead and say it in the hopes that your motivations will change: girls and guys alike love it when you put forth the effort to learn to speak their native language. There, I said it.   Well, that’s it. Those are my 10 reasons for learning Cantonese. Interested? Then I suggest the following few methods to begin your learning:

• Pimsleur Cantonese – Pimsleur is a great start for learning any language, and Cantonese is no exception. It’s expensive, but you can get it for about half price here. There’s only one level of Cantonese to learn (compared to Mandarin’s 3 levels), but it’s a start.
• Teach Yourself Cantonese – This is a pretty good program for learning Cantonese. It includes a text book as well as CDs for you auditory learners. I never finished it because of getting sidetracked with life (only got through like 15 pages at most), but it’s a solid program. You can get it from lots of places, including Amazon.com. I’ll warn you; the binding on these books used to be pretty shoddy, but when I wrote the publisher to complain after my book fell apart for no reason, someone wrote back assuring me that their next editions would have upgraded binding. That was about 6 months ago, so hopefully it’s better now.
• Cantonese Help Sheets – It’s not exactly a course, more of a tutor in learning Cantonese. It’s well worth a look. Check it out.

  There you have it, my 10 plus reasons for learning Cantonese. Get started now, because it’ll take a lifetime to master…   ]]> http://www.due-east.org/2009/10/21/top-10-reasons-to-learn-cantonese/feed/ 5 http://www.due-east.org/2008/12/26/8-mistakes-to-avoid-when-learning-chinese/ http://www.due-east.org/2008/12/26/8-mistakes-to-avoid-when-learning-chinese/#comments Fri, 26 Dec 2008 06:48:13 +0000 Due-East http://www.due-east.org/2008/12/26/8-mistakes-to-avoid-when-learning-chinese/ a great post on TheChinaExpat.com highlighting some common mistakes learners of Chinese make, and I thought I’d post about it here. The eight mistakes highlighted by the post are: 1.) Not mastering the tones, 2.) Not learning characters, 3.) Killing yourself learning characters, 4.) Focusing on progress [...]]]>     I just came across a great post on TheChinaExpat.com highlighting some common mistakes learners of Chinese make, and I thought I’d post about it here. The eight mistakes highlighted by the post are: 1.) Not mastering the tones, 2.) Not learning characters, 3.) Killing yourself learning characters, 4.) Focusing on progress over process, 5.) Not making good Chinese friends, 6.) Not using the best learning materials available, 7.) Choosing poor classes, and 8.) Not using [awesome] tools for learning Chinese.   Number one, I have to say, is usually a matter of ability. Some people I know who really try hard to learn Chinese just don’t have the ear for the tones. They try and try and try but never get the tones down. Everything they say is said with a rising tone, which is pretty hard on native speakers’ ears. So for those people not to master the tones is understandable. But I’ve also met some extremely arrogant foreigners who just plain don’t care about tones and don’t try to learn them. Not long ago, I talked to a guy who had lived in Shanghai for over 2 years. I had heard he had been living there before I met him, so I was fully expecting his Chinese to be pretty amazing. But then he opened his mouth to speak, and he sounded horrible. And he went on to say that he doesn’t care about the tones and doesn’t think they’re important to the language. Tones are an integral part of Chinese! To say they’re not important is incredibly disrespectful to Chinese speakers. It’s the equivalent of someone saying, “I don’t think consonants are important for speaking English.” It’s just wrong, and if you have that attitude, you don’t deserve to be understood.   I also appreciated number four. I at times struggle with this myself. It’s easy to get discouraged by the fact that you just can’t express yourself fully in any situation, read and understand any newspaper, and follow any movie’s plot without subtitles after studying the language for over five years. But apparently it’s realistic to expect to have to study Chinese full-time (and probably live in China) for 10 to 20 years before becoming truly fluent in all respects. But if you focus on what you can’t say/understand rather than on using what you can say/understand, you’ll have a hard time progressing beyond where you currently are. The ChinaExpat post links to some pretty encouraging (or discouraging, depending on your disposition) articles about the subject.   The other points seem to me to be pretty good advice as well, so if you’re just now beginning to learn the language, go check it out. You’ll save yourself time and frustration.   Link to article   ]]> http://www.due-east.org/2008/12/26/8-mistakes-to-avoid-when-learning-chinese/feed/ 2