Learning Cantonese - part II.

I first started listening to Cantonese advanced podcasts, because I thought that since I wanted to listen to the sound of the language and get used to its flow first, any spoken Cantonese would do. It turned out that the knowledge of Mandarin and Classical Chinese could be way too helpful in order to just learn Cantonese as a completely new language and so I switched to newbie and elementary lessons, where I could get into some structure as well. I did not try to find out how many tones there were in Cantonese or what their description was. It was really relaxing to say the least. No stress from trying to reproduce the tonal curve I saw in the book, no stress from trying to “mimic a picture”, no stress from trying to reproduce the correct sound pitch and so on. I also didn't have to subconsciously solve problems like: Is the tone high enough? Doesn't it sound strange when I say it like this? How many tones are below this tone I just said? Is this tone different enough from that other tone starting at the same pitch? So many questions every student has to face just trying to produce a simple “Hello” in Cantonese, when he or she learns the tones through descriptions. Now what I mean by feeling no stress is that of course no one is expecting me to get the pronunciation right the first time and naturally I will do mistakes, but the point I'm trying to make is that this way I have much less stress when it comes to the number of things I have to worry about while trying to say one or two simple words. The main difference is that I am concentrating only on the sound. Cantonese and Mandarin syllables are very specific and their sound is sometimes surprisingly outstanding so remembering it and later reproducing it absolutely correctly without having to write the sound down should be easier than forcing oneself to reproduce something previously seen in writing. If one only listens to native material (preferably recorded by several native speakers) and is not interfered by the wrong pronunciation of his fellow students, one should also be less likely to make mistakes while trying to reproduce the sound, since native pronunciation of the sound is all one hears.

In support of my theory, my studies were going well and I even learned a couple of phrases “accidentally” since all I wanted to do was listen to the sounds and not study anything, until out of curiosity I listened to a lesson explaining the tones of Cantonese. After this lesson my entire Cantonese relaxation collapsed. It was all so simple up to that point and after it, it became as stressful as my Mandarin studies. How many tones are there? Wait, which tone was this one again? High/low enough? What about the tones in the second the third and the fourth word? What about tonal combinations? Do the tones change in Cantonese just as they do in Mandarin? How many tones are below the tone I just heard? Am I pronouncing them well enough? Was the curve of the tone ok? Rising? falling......... terrible. All this just to say “mm hou yi si” in Cantonese.

As a result of all of this what I’m working on right now is trying to forget about that lesson by not listening to absolutely any Cantonese for the moment and trying to get back to my previous mindset. Luckily my knowledge of Cantonese is close to zero so this shouldn't be very difficult. I don’t have any specific plans, because as I found out with Mandarin, all plans will fail and problems need to be solved as they come. I’m also in no hurry and after studying Mandarin I realized that languages so foreign to us require a lot of time. Not because there is so much to learn, but because there is so much that needs to “sink in” and cannot be fooled by speed learning. No one expects us to pronounce the tones correctly in a few hours or days and some don’t know how to do so even after 20 years of living in Taiwan so why the stress? We can spend a couple of weeks if not months only listening to the language slowly “epiphanizing” the sounds. Mastering these sounds is a very difficult thing to do and by showing us the tonal graphs we trick ourselves into thinking it is easy.

My plans right now are, that I first have to wait to be able to listen to Cantonese again and I will listen to it until I will feel that I have a solid command of the pronunciation and am using the correct part of the brain to do so. I believe (and I actually read about this somewhere too) that one’s pronunciation is influenced by the part of the brain the information is stored into. I was talking about the word 比利時 in my “Learning Chinese” blog entry and to think about it, when I pronounce this word and pronounce 沒有 for instance (a word that I must have used about a million times now and it still is slightly tiring for me to do so, proof that for Mandarin spaced repetition does not work that well) it really does feel like a different part of my brain is used in these two cases.

After this “sound absorbing” stage I will do something different. I will try to chat a lot with my friends from Hong Kong and try to see what ways I could use to improve my retention rate of vocabulary and sentence structures. I will also try to use as much of my Mandarin and Classical Chinese knowledge when the time will be right. When it comes down to it, effectiveness should be most important and  I will only be able to tell, whether this approach is effective or not only after I’ve learned how to speak Cantonese to an advanced level and until then I think a lot of time has to pass. 

Learning Cantonese - part I.

As every good language lover I also have a wish list of languages that I would love to speak one day but sadly as life is short most of these wishes only remain wishes. Cantonese was also one of those languages I wanted to study for a long time but since I had no friends from Hong Kong (or the area) or plans to live there any time soon, it remained only a wish for a possible future date. Last year in November I visited Hong Kong for 10 days and I had so much fun there and the Cantonese language sounded so good that I decided that I really wanted to study the language the first chance I get.

I personally don’t think it is a very good idea to study more than one language at the same time and I also don’t think it is a good idea to try and learn as many languages as one can in the shortest possible time, because in my opinion language learning should not be viewed upon as a sport or a competition so as I study Farsi at the moment, to study a little bit of Cantonese as well would be against my own philosophy. But then again I also think that interest and motivation are extremely important so a bit of Cantonese can do no harm. I only decided to dab a little with the sound system of the language anyway. The only resource that I am using right now is the new cantoneseclass101 podcast. There are currently not that many newbie and beginner lessons available, but it will do fine for now.

In my Learning Chinese blog entry I was talking about how in my view the “mathematical” explanation of tones (or any explanation of tones for that matter) negatively influenced my entire learning process. Cantonese pronunciation is even more complex than Mandarin (I intentionally do not mention tones and their number in either language) so people could logically assume it should be more difficult to learn than Mandarin. The fact is that little kids in Hong Kong learn Cantonese effortlessly with a native pronunciation just as we've learned our native languages and western kids growing up in those regions do the same. Cantonese people often don't even know that their language has tones whatsoever. I know that a child’s brain is at a different stage of development while absorbing the native language and is at the time under completely different conditions than we are but there are some similarities and I decided to choose a similar, maybe a little bit more sophisticated but still similar approach as children have.

While learning Mandarin I was constantly thinking about what I was doing wrong and why it was so difficult for me to be effortlessly fluent and have native like pronunciation in this language. I was also observing my foreign friends here in Taiwan and one of my Japanese friends in particular completely blew me away. He was 21, and came to Taiwan with almost zero knowledge of Chinese. He was not a very diligent student and has spent most of his time hanging out with his Taiwanese friends. After 10 months in Taiwan his Chinese was absolutely amazing. He sounded very Taiwanese with good grammar, vocabulary and Taiwanese pronunciation, the only “problem” being that he sounded exactly like his friends. He copied everything they were saying and gradually had built up enough sentences and vocabulary to start speaking on his own. I've never seen him take any notes, deliberately study grammar or force himself to study in his free time. One might argue that because of the influence of Japanese vocabulary has had on Chinese he had a big advantage, but this advantage helped him only during more technical discussions. In everyday speech he was just really good in mimicking his friends and gradually started to put together sentences himself. His pronunciation was also very good. At least for someone who has been studying the language for only 10 months.

So where does Cantonese and child language acquisition come into all of this? I wanted to adopt the same “strategy” my Japanese friend has adopted, because it was very effective and because it was closest to how little children learn their first language and give it little structure using my experience. 

In the first months I would only try to listen to interesting material and later mimic with no stress of forgetting something the things I've heard until I build up a solid sound and sentence structure basis to start serious studies and eventually spend some time in Hong Kong. It might sound completely unprofessional, but at the same time I did learn 4 foreign languages (Italian, Russian, Spanish, Mandarin) from scratch to advanced fluency as an adult (after the age of 23) so I think if anything, I can at least talk from my own experience as a student and teacher of foreign languages, that with languages as different to us as Cantonese, all other known strategies will fail.

The duration of this “Listen with no stress only” period can be adapted to any language a student wishes to study and varies from case to case. Languages like English, German, Russian, Italian or French, even if they are incomprehensible at first while you study them, they really seem like dialects of the same language when compared to Mandarin or Cantonese. They share the same structures, same vocabulary and culture. After you've understood the inner logic of 80-90% of what’s going on in the language (and I don't mean grammar, just the pure way the language works) you're good to go. This might vary from a couple of months for Italian to a couple of years for Mandarin.