my grandpa once asked me to translate an eng article to him in chinese...stared at it for like 30min only to tell him i dun understand lol...i got a long lecture after that bout how iimportant it is to know ur mothertongue and blah blah blah....she then asked my mom to translate it and she did it instantly haha i got owned...=(
cantonese is sorta part of chinese yah...if that i rekon il get a A rekon 92%ish for cantonese and 2% for mandorin... i can listen to the news and interperet wat their sayin and all..but not a full oficial high paid translator im use to translatin for aunts and uncles cause my dads side of the family forbids us to use english to tlk to them so we read and translate news for them...
hmm mines ok i guess but when i go to like HK people can tell straight away im BBC prob cause of accent xD. Oh and my mum laughs at me when i say like a word the wrong way round heheh =p
I can understand enough to get by, I guess. I can understand HK news, most TVB drama dialogue, and most conversations, but get technical on me (i.e. medical terminology and stuff like that) and I start guessing. Formal Chinese is waaaaaaay beyond me. I'm less fluent speaking, though. My passive understanding of the language far exceeds my active understanding.
I think my chinese is superb (for a white boy), but i can't understand the news here in Taiwan. I can watch the tv sitcoms with no problem though
i can speak, translate, and listen cantonese. i have no problem with it, being since my brother is stationed in italy i have to translate letters for my parents. i'm and ABC and funny a couple of my co-workers say i have a chinese accent when i speak english with them
ABC here. I can speak Cantonese fluently, understand the news, be able to translate Chinese in a hospital (actually, I had to help a hired hospital translator once because she didn't know some of the technical terms =P), and blend right in whenever I go to HK (ie no accent, I can bargain in the street markets, and talk about finances in Cantonese with my family there). I can read magazines & karaoke lyrics completely, but not quite the newspaper yet. I can write letters to family & little post-it notes to people, but by no means an editorial article. I found that it helped tremendously when I was growing up that my parents only spoke Chinese with me. They would not answer me if I spoke English with them, and they went out of their way to teach me technical terms (financial & medical) whenever we ran across them. I find it annoying and disappointing when I see Chinese parents speaking English with their kids thinking that they will help them assimilate faster and do better in school. I mean , come one, they will eventually be surrounded by everything in English; Their English will be fine ! But how often will they see Chinese? That's why I'm a strong proponent of speaking Chinese exclusively with one's children. I also learned to take it with a grain of salt when people tell me they speak Chinese fluently. One of my current best friends was raised in Chinatown and told me he speaks Canto fluently when we first met. But when i actually start talking to him, he couldn't understand many of the technical words I used and he substituted many words with English. At one point it became so obstructive that I just started talking to him in English =P
My Canto is okies... I can speak it and stuff but can't read or write >.< My understanding is about...90%?
i can listen, read and talk cantonese almost perfectly...but writing is just not good. i can also listen to mandarin perfectly...speaking is good and reading..same as canto...but writing chinese ...that i'm disabled
I can hold a good enough conversation with my canto/hk friends, and i can usually understand the formal stuff like news (or get the main gist) but dont ask me to be a proper translator or speak formally I like to speak Chinglish, where is i dont actually know a word, i will replace it with english mid canto-conversation
yeh my parents also spoke to me in canto only, and that is the only reason i can speak canto now but my cousin's parents speak to him in english and he can barely speak canto now, its kinda stupid cause they send him to chinese school. I think they realised their mistake when they went back to Hk and loadsa his relatives and stuff complained that he couldnt speak chinese and that they shouldnt speak to him english...
haha i do that too with the chinglish thing, but its not as bad nows as you see hong kong people now do it too
yeh when I watch TVB, they replace so many words My fav is when they replace 感覺 with "feel", sounds so funny to me everytime i hear it
^ haha, yeh i keep hearing that one and the sudden increase of english names in TVB programmes, and some names are so hideous its so funny -lol
Your cousin can't speak Canto even though he went to Chinese school? How many years of Chinese school did he attend?
