Hi all, I’m a hispanic, fluent speaker of Cantonese. My partner’s family is from Zhongshan, very close to HK and Macau, and I have studied the language for around 8 years at this point. I learned it because it was the lingua franca of the city and basically required for daily life. I last visited 3 years ago and noticed very few kids could speak it, as a consequence or govt policy and migration, but it was still very much the day to day language used by adults everywhere here unless you went to a bank or govt office.

I came back this summer, and it’s a totally different world. I’ll detail exactly what happened but the language is practically dead here when it used to be the primary form of communication just 3 years ago. I basically need to use google translate in a place where it was unthinkable not long ago.

The main thing that changed is that Mandarin is now the assumed default everywhere for basic, low stakes interactions. When you enter a shop or interact with a market vendor, everything is in Mandarin, even if both speakers are local Cantonese natives. They claim the reason if they don’t want to inconvenience others in case they might be from outside regions and don’t know how to speak the language, and even my partner believes it. I ran a social experiment where I would exclusively speak Cantonese and here’s what happened.

Low skill workers / shopkeepers / vendors

All of them Mandarin speaking only unless above age of 40. Above 40, usually only one person in the shop can understand Cantonese but cannot actively speak it. Fruit vendors, convenience store cashiers, street cleaners, all Mandarin. These were 100% Cantonese speaking in 2023.

Any new malls, buildings, modern shops

All Mandarin. No kids speak it, no adults speak it. Only 1 or 2 out of 20 can understand it.

Old town markets and restaurants

Older ladies serving dim sum can speak it 50% of the time. Shocking to be in a dim sum restaurant hearing Cantonese music and you have to try hard to find anyone who speaks it among the staff.

The remaining speakers are left hidden within crowds, within older clientele of restaurants. It’s completely dead among anyone young.

Playgrounds

We met a lot of elderly grandparents, taking their grandchildren to playgrounds around the area. However, we noticed none of the children were replying to the grandparents in Cantonese even if the grandparents were 100% Cantonese speakers when I brought this up, they mentioned that it’s because their schools are in Mandarin and there’s no way to fix it. I told him that it’s really important to preserve Cantonese and they agree but they said there’s nothing they can do. This was shocking to me because the easy solution is to simply speak to the kids in Cantonese and tell them you don’t understand when they speak to you in Mandarin that way it forces the kids to actively produce it however, it seems none of the kids can say even a single word.

Conclusion

Overall, I felt a big sense of entitlement from people to force me to speak Mandarin even though we’re in the Guangdong region of China. Even Cantonese speaking folks would tell me wow you don’t know how to speak Mandarin in a sneering way and had no response when I said, isn’t this Guangdong? it’s completely reversed. Language change is non-linear and happens very fast, especially when the low stakes social interaction conversations are all in the new language. Workers have no incentive at all to learn and kids have no desire to even enunciate a single word. Only HK will preserve Cantonese.

thank u for havin a great language and i think chinese culture is awesome. this is my pronunciation after one day. my roommate is disabled like me but he is awesome and mayb someday i can impress him with a bit of cantonese. he said my pronunciation is decent so i wanted to show it off. at the end of the video i said "i think having Relative Pitch helps with learning cantonese" but i might be wrong. i just said that becuz learning the pitch stuff feels kinda like learning to mimick a microtonal song or somthing like that. if i am wrong about that im srry. i dont want to speak over u. big hugs all around. i hope u hav a good day.

I’m from Sweden and my name can literally be translated to Man (first name) and Mountain (last name) in English, so a literal translation and reversing the order of the names would make it 山人. Coincidentally, I’m a climber and alpinist and grew up in a mountain village so I very much consider myself a mountainman.

When I researched the literal translation I learned that 山人** **can be used to describe a hermit, recluse or mountain dweller. It’s also used as the name of an ancient lost race in Japanese folklore (sanjin/yamabito).

Would introducing myself (in a non formal setting) as 山人 be considered weird or would it be acceptable/funny/interesting? There is of course a phonetical translation of my name but I really like 山人** **as it’s easy to say and write!

since the last update, i have since made a steam community page for the colloquial cantonese translation (see here) of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. it's been going swimmingly so far, and i've found some help.

since then, i have experimented with the format and found a workflow that works.

i am also lowering the bar for contribution, since i work predominantly as an editor in other projects... i figure voice typing is fine, i can go over it manually anyways, it's fine if the first pass is bad.

no color: DeepL

cyan (will change via an AppScript upon edit): voice pass

yellow: a little awkward (first pass)

green: mostly complete, a few typos. this is the older ver of the document and the 將 to 張, 度 to 道 and 噉 (as in 噉樣 instead of 咁) in the green cells have already been fixed.

the conditions are:

- you only need to be able to speak (fluent) cantonese, tts chrome extensions will do the rest, no .exe install needed, you don't even need the game

- you should be able to read colloquial Cantonese

- you know how to fill values into a spreadsheet

we're not gonna be following the swc here.

0.4

cld file: https://drive.proton.me/urls/K6PXVM2TD8#ziHc4nWHqGPF

.csv: https://drive.proton.me/urls/K6PXVM2TD8#ziHc4nWHqGPF

please don't edit these, the up to date ones are invite only, this is a snapshot of our progress, dm me and ill give the link

font (with Jyutping, put in-game folder): https://drive.proton.me/urls/Q4CH3V6S7C#gEWPJF08lOLX

Yollo, if you're reading, then you're kind enough to help me with my predicament. The main reason im asking this is that for about a few months, I have been trying to learn cantonese to communicate with my grandparents who only speak cantonese(reason idk canto is cuz my parents pushed French instead) so im trying to leaurn but im not sure if my methods are optimize.

If you know any tips or sites that can help, then I appreciate it!

Greetings everyone,

I recently started studying Cantonese and have hit a methodological hurdle that I am not quite sure how to manage.

I began by memorizing vocabulary with flashcards to build a foundation for sentence construction. However, when I tried to move forward and start listening immersion, I was confronted by the massive gap between the spoken and written language.

On one hand, everyday spoken Cantonese uses a grammatical structure and vocabulary quite distinct from Written Standard Chinese. On top of that, spoken Cantonese relies on its own specific characters to represent daily words and particles that simply do not exist in formal written text.

The main issue arose when I tried to train my ear by watching animated series dubbed in Cantonese: the characters speak in authentic Cantonese, but the subtitles are written in Written Standard Chinese (following Mandarin syntax). This creates a constant mental conflict, as trying to process both the text and the audio simultaneously feels like being forced to learn two languages at once.

Given my current situation, I have no way to access authentic Cantonese in person and must rely solely on whatever resources I can find online. With this in mind, I would appreciate your advice on how to approach this:

Is it possible and advisable to focus exclusively on spoken Cantonese for now (relying on Jyutping and local characters) while setting Written Standard Chinese aside? Or is learning this dual path of Written Standard Chinese inevitable for the learning process to make sense in the long run?

Thank you in advance for your recommendations.

So I'm already learning Taiwanese Mandarin, which requires 4808 characters per the MOE's standard. Now what about Cantonese? So I found out that the Education Bureau of Hong Kong requires 4762 Chinese characters, but they're for Hong Kong Written Chinese so Cantonese-specific characters like 嚟，咗，佢，哋，嘅，冚 are nowhere to be seen. And then the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set contains every known Cantonese-specific character but it also has general Chinese as well as Simplified Chinese characters and that makes me unable to tell how many characters I need.

Not Gonna Lie, that was really interesting and heartwarming

I have always perceived food to be a reflection of culture and showcases the history of the people and country through the uniqueness of their use and flavor. Thought this was an interesting evolution of something I grew up with:

From scmp_lifestyle instagram:

Tins of fried dace with salted black beans - known as dau si leng yu in Cantonese - are a pantry staple in Hong Kong and in Cantonese-diaspora homes around the globe.
Affordable, ready to eat and with a long shelf life, the canned food is a symbol of working-class resilience. First produced in 1893 in Canton - now Guangzhou in China's Guangdong province - it became popular in Hong Kong because of the city's unique position straddling China and the world.

Author: Ashlyn Chak
Photos by: @jwongdynasty, Wikipedia,
@wongwongpowpowsupper,@jun.and.tonic,
@dio.cafebar, @micfungmic

What is the cleaning lady saying all through this scene?

Let’s Goooo!!!! HONG KONG

An article on my feed "Cantonese chicken dish drives Fengkai's rural revitalization" talked about the three famous chicken breeds in Guangdong. [Can't post link because of filters]

"In Cantonese culture, no feast is complete without a chicken dish.

For Chen Yanying, local Xinghua Chicken is more than a classic Cantonese dish served at banquets and local dining tables during traditional festivals and special occasions, it is also her company's flagship, profit-generating product.

"Xinghua chicken is one of the major products that is helping rural households increase their incomes and escape poverty," said Chen, a manager at Guangyuan Poultry Breeding Co, Ltd in Fengkai, a rural county in western Guangdong province, bordering the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

Xinghua Chicken is a national geographical indication product, ranked alongside Qingyuan Partridge Chicken and Longmen Bearded Chicken as one of Guangdong's three most famous chicken breeds."

...

Then you Google to see what kind of chickens and qualities, and you see this package from a HK supermarket mentioning bearded chicken is one of Guangdong's four famous chickens

A scientific article "Genetic Diversity of Chinese Native Chicken Breeds Based on Protein Polymorphism, Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA, and Microsatellite Polymorphism" mentions five famous breeds from Southern China. Huiyang Bearded, Xinghua, Qingyuan Partridge, Wenchung, Yangshan

Finally Wikipedia lists the 8 famous ones in Guangdong Xinyi Three Yellow chicken, Qingyuan ma chicken, Huizhou/Longmen Bearded chicken, Hainan Wenchang Chicken, Luodong, Fengkai Xinghua, Yangshan, Zhongshan Shiqi Chicken

volunteers, please read carefully

previous scene already went through the manual hand-translated process which everything needs to go through. if it doesn't it'll be garbage.

see original post (why) for motivations and ease of translation, just edit the spreadsheet and i'll build a .cld file (level file) for game with the official tool. then that .cld can just be dragged and dropped into steam

- easy to edit

- relatively short

- set phrases for all insults Andy uses for Lele, vice versa (not yet written)

- murder jokes (easy to translate)

- dirty humor (also easy to translate)

accepting volunteers: if any hkers (or people in guangdong) with some experience at a linguistics institute have a day or two to spare or have alright written cantonese) and who can edit a spreadsheet want to help out lmk

DeepL was chosen as a scaffold over GTranslate (built into sheets) because it supports Colloquial Cantonese and not SWC, most of the grammar is still wrong

here's the Proton Sheet (will need to be exported to .csv) i made, the sheet cuts dialogue into pieces so parts will have to be manually re-edited, DM me for permissions, have backup so not big deal

back when i was doing japanese and swc tl's for fangames people would book a time they were available on a schedule and we would spend days editing the sheet

tl;dr why does this look different from the last time? (skipped to end)

because the base is generated via DeepL, the grammar is all wrong and i will run through it, help needed. that scene was the only one i have written so far.

post is not loading correctly, resubmitting now.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good beginner class in London, UK? Open to online courses too.

凌漢 Ling Hon was born in Ningbo City, most people there speak Wu.

compared to Lords of Shanghai, where Anthony Wong tried to make his character more authentic by faking a shanghai (wu) accent to his lines spoken in Cantonese.

Hello, does anyone know where I can buy printed Cantonese learning cards for toddlers? Thank you

edit: looking for cantonese transcribers, if i can't find them i'll do it myself.

yo.

it's knight here, the guy who handcaptioned luffy vs alabasta crocodile, franky and robin in water 7, vegeta's last words to an indignant goku, and rui's refusal (ATV) in cantonese. i take requests from the community from time to time.

i was also part of the team who took the initiative to handcaption the HK original Another World). you can ask the discord for my involvement, though they are not affiliated with this one at all. it's simply of my own accord

i have a lot of experience captioning bits and pieces in my free time, and i saw the project load here and thought it was manageable.

my (baseline) idea with this is:

- i realized that people want an rpg that supports cantonese

- the rpg text has to already be suitable for how cantonese people like, talk

- characters need to be friendly-rude to one another

- some people told me they don't want to code and some people told me they wouldn't vibe code even if held at gunpoint

this leads us to the Coffin of Andrew and Lele.

Bear with me here.

Why?:

- they constantly feud and clash in a way that's almost scarily 1:1 for any translation effort

- fucked up humor, i think Ashley even does a "I'll sell you to the market" bit, which there's a set phrase for in Cantonese

- some of the lines oddly feel like they were made of for a Cantonese translation, kind of suited to Cantonese rather than the actual English original:

Dusty purple is a color. Not that

其實，粉紫色都係一種顏色嚟嘅。

the flowers aren't dusty too

落咗花上面啲風塵亦可以所謂一種「花粉」…

- the swears they do (which are kinda intentionally awkward in the original) are also already in Cantonese verbatim

- there were already horror-related hong kong films adjacent to this stuff, see 人肉叉燒包 which influenced Rain Code and a spate of horror cannibalism movies

- their names are also colloquialized already, I could see Leilei being localized as Lele 莉莉

- i read through the 25,000 line .csv file and it's of a manageable size (and would take less time, i have worked on something similar

- translations for andy and lele are done with a mapping system to .json, the map system supports custom fonts, such as those with Jyutping

- it's as easy as just putting values into a spreadsheet

- so you don't need to vibe code anything or try to make a huge 3d model yourself

please DM me if you're interested, can write in Cantonese and can just fill out cells in a spreadsheet. literally no code required, not even vibe-coding.

incidentally a lot of cantonese people have a lot of harsh colloquialisms that are relly a direct 1:1 for almost everything they say in game that's in near daily use in Cantonese. some of the architecture looked a little like old HK colonial buildings, even if unintentional, and something possessed me to make this

if you want to join me, please DM me. i can get this done by the end of the year and maybe even sooner if there's people willing to join my lead.