And that annoys me to no end... Native speaker DO NOT automatically mean fluency by my book. In fact it's quite true to MOST languages, we don't consider anyone SPEAKING the actual FORMAL WRITTEN language fluent... LOL, I wish I can change my perspective to fluency too, then I will be FLUENT in French Which I obviously am not at the moment (by my book) -rolleyes I am serious when I say MANY cannot handle formal usage of Chinese. Try getting them to write a memo in the PROPER way, 3 out of 10 make numerous mistakes in doing so, and around 5 fail to do it like AT ALL. It's sad, really. As I have said before, I "wish" I can adopt the OTHER STANDARD, then I'll be fluent in French -tongue2 Or not push at all since they already attained the level of desired fluency...
try speaking it to a bunch of friends that are from hk or canton and then ask them if they can tell your not speaking it correctly its always the way you pronounce it
I think my friend might be one of those since she told me she failed her Chinese classes in HK. And actually, I'm trying to learn how to read and write Chinese too, so she tells me that whenever I want my stuff to be proofread, I should go seek someone else. *shrugs* -what? pfft. Yup.
Exactly like my life story there too -^_^. I too was just 'meh' about Chinese until I befriended HKers studying abroad here in Canada. I think that had I not met them, I would have totally lost my ability to comprehend in Chinese. I think not only has improving my Chinese allowed me to make new friends, but it has also opened up my doors, and made me more aware of who I am as a young, educated Chinese-Canadian in an evolving society, who can fully communicate in English, and hopefully fully communicate (read, write and speak like a native HK) Chinese one day.
i reckon fluent is jus bein able to speak it without stutterin n understandin everythin perfectly fine...i can translate english to canto n canto to english perfectly so i guess i wud b considered fluent!
i can speak canto, but sometimes i just end up getting stuck not knowing what the word i'm trying to say is...
i can be considered fluent in daily conversation....but I am english educated so i write and read little chinese....i'm steadily improving my ability to recognize words...
me 2 ...I can speak canto only, either writing in chinese or speak manderin ... I also end up without knowing any word that i'm trying to say to someone...:(
I guess there can be different kinds of fluency. So you are considered fluent in speaking, but not fluent in reading and writing chinese.
lmao, well I don't know how you guys are, but in my opinion fluently is when you can speak cantonese with some other guys without thinking or with some breaks in your sentences, you speak it out without thining actually. As for the conto pop, they arenn't that hard to understand. I myself can speak and read characters but hardly can write them since I haven't been on the chinese school for ages....
my canto is very good manly because of the fact that my older brother when i was a kid shouted at me when ever i used english in the house cos he didnt want me to grow up not knowing my own language. kinda gratefull now ^_^Y
i guess i'm pretty fluent in canto.... maybe. lots of you have different views about what "fluent" means, but I can talk, i can read and i can write in canto. So is that fluent? lols. When I was in chinese school, [i graduated like 5 months ago -lol] my teacher once said that, technically, there's no way to write cantonese, because what we're learning to write is actually mandarin...if that makes any sense. That's why we canto speakers dont really understand HK pop because it doesn't contain any slang that we use when we talk. I guess ppl who speak mandarin are more formal than we are? -rotfl
being fluent encompasses everything: reading, writing and speaking (informal and formal) or at least for the informal part (IMO) if you don't speak it, at least understand it so with that being said i'm not fluent. i can hold a conversation in canto (although sometimes words pop out in a wrong tone occasionally), read some (little) chinese, write nothing (except for a few characters.. the result of dropping chinese school), and understand (most of) the formal word usage
manderin people are certainly more formal, they speak in the way of how we write chinese, so its exactly/almost the same. However, for cantonese people they speak more or less in slang/informal language... because some words has been tweaked in the past for some reasons... However, HK pop doesn't seem too hard to understand... at least for me then...
my canto is pretty good i think... i speak canto to my parents and to a lot of friends(got a lot of canto friends) and also have been to chinese school for 12 years. (my english is not so good, cuz im from the netherlands)
Well I can't say I am fluent in Cantonese. But this is what I commonly speak at home with my relatives and my family. Once step out of the door, I gotta speak English and no Cantonese is allowed because you have to communicate with the Americans. That's very typical.
