Yes my canto is pretty fluent. At home I speak canto to my parents... and I also have a lot of canto friends, so its pretty natural talking to them. I can also understand the many slangs and sayings too, partly because I watch a lot of tvb dramas. HEHE
Living in HK and interacting with the people there will be a great help to improve cantonese. Although I moved to vancouver when I was young, I went back to HK frequently and had summer jobs there which were a great help. Even though I went to chinese school daily in vancouver, many usages of canto were not taught or avoided on purpose.
ofcourse... doing it in practical is best to improve it... but learning it at chinese school is a good begin btw... I like your username hahahaha
When it comes to lyrics, most of the time they read it off the paper so it would be formal and usually the way we talk is informal, its different from writing and reading, not sure if you know what I mean, lol. I'm kind of fluent, I understand formal and informal, that might be because I know how to read most of the easy stuff but I can't write...
cant understand canto pop period, but like talking informally i got that, but sometimes when my mom talks in like the more in depth canto like the old canto i cant really understand
being raised in the us...being fluent in cantonese is just crazy hard since im too lazy to learn it but i can understand...and keep up with a person in a canto conversation but there are words that i would know but slip my mind...easy stuff lol...as for Cpop.....wow words that i don't usually hear, i cannot understand it 100% but i get hte jist of it. Its apart of being raised in the states i guess, only reason i picked it up is cause of my family.
i cant consider myself fluent i struggle saying some words sometime because im so used to english i sometimes alternate between english and cantonese
same here Yong-Shi! But i'm not ABC.. lol i'm pure Chinese and i come from Malaysia! I speak Cantonese with my family/relatives everyday in Cantonese & English. English is my first language, then Canto comes second. Last time, when i speak Cantonese in school, my friends often laugh at me saying that my accent sounds funny. That caused my dislike of Cantonese. But a few years ago, i started to like Cantonese after my dad stopped my tuition, thus making me free at night to watch TVB series!! i see HK news everyday in the papers but i can't read certain words.. i can only get the rough idea of the news.. yeah that made me pretty sad. i can understand, but i can't read/write. so i started watching more TV and learning them from friends. Now, i'm pretty OKAY in my Cantonese, not to say very fluent, but i definitely improved -lol
It depends what age you are; as you get older, you realise that you need those complex words to express yourself. I can speak fluent Canto, but not so fluent Mando. Turn on the TV, and switch to a Canto news channel. Watch one report, and if you can understand most of the words and can repeat that report in your own words in Canto, I would say you could speak Canto fluently.
Being fluent in Cantonese means reading this entire thread and translating it word for word on the fly. Inotherwords, you should have absolutely no trouble reading everything here and speaking the thread out loud, but in Cantonese. Forget about technical terms, ie. words like "circumference, carbon dioxide, or systolic blood pressure." This entire thread is essentially in conversational English. If you can't translate this into Cantonese on the fly, then you're not even up to "conversational" level in Cantonese, much less "fluency." What many overseas Chinese claim to be fluency is really just "Dim Sum" Cantonese; the stuff that gets by for ordering in Chinese restaurants. My kids are perfect examples, and it makes me want to cry. Ralph
but hey, it's never too late to get them to pick it up...as long as they're interested in something chinese...i mean i hated learning it in a formal classroom setting, but i reckon i've picked up heaps by watching tvb dramas with chinese subtitles. otherwise there's still hope if they get interested in like chinese music...i mean i had heaps of friends in school who picked up jap and/or korean like that.....
haha. yeah. ditto. tvb dramas is where i learned most of my chinese. whenever i go to hk, my family are all amazed at how well i can speak but i hated learning in a classroom as a kid but then having grown up i think learning it isn't so bad in a classroom cuz you can make it fun.
=] im good at canto/mando, but i cant speak english good =| theres alot of canto "slang" that is used more often than the formal way, so most overseas orientated cantonese speakers wont noe the formal way of saying the words, usually learning mandarin will help u notice which word is "slang"-afied, The slangs dont actually make sense if u say them in mandarin or write them down =O and its not normally used in canto pop, so canto music is pretty much like mandarin songs but spoken in canto =p get it?? =D
haha i know what you mean with the canto pop.. im like that with the music.. like i understand bits of it.. but then i actually have to read the chinese lyrics to understand it... i can speak cantonese.. easily to my parents and with other ppl from the same city as me.. but when i speak to my hk friends.. i speak really badly and stutter haha..maybe because i think they'll not understand what im saying or say "you're cantonese is soo crap" lol =P
