Cantonese - Animefangirl!

Watched Kung Fu Cult Master (Jet Li movie)

Watched it in Cantonese, of course. But with subtitles because Kung Fu Cult Master (a.k.a. Evil Cult a.k.a Lord of Wu Tang) is one of my favorite kung fu movies of all time and I can’t bear to not understand a single line. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

Summary: Two different schools of kung fu fight for possession of two magic swords that will let the owner know all martial-arts secrets. Young Chang Mo-kei (Jet Li) is caught between the two but is unable to do anything because he suffers from a curse that prevents him from practicing kung fu. All that changes with an invitation from an alluring young woman one sultry evening…

Don’t worry, nothing happens with the alluring young woman. And in fact the “nothing happens” sends Mo-kei into a rage that drives him off a cliff and into the lair of the only man who can cure his curse. The movie kicks into super-overdrive from that point and doesn’t let up until the rather unsatisfying ending.

Best features: I don’t think too much of Jet Li as an actor, but as a martial artist he’s always a delight to watch. His actions are crisp, fluid and logical. Everything moves smoothly from one attack to the next. Even when he’s firing off balls of light you get the sense it’s the most practical option at the time. And it’s not just him but all the other battles are well-choreographed and easy to follow, even the ones featuring what look like thousands of extras on the screen.

It may also be because I’ve watched this at least 3 times, but I found the story easy to follow despite the sheer number of players. It’s easiest to divide them into two broad groups and remember that the people you spend the most time hanging with are the Shaolin coalition and that the really bad guys are the Yuen government’s dogs.

There’s good chemistry between Chang Mo-kei and his leading ladies, especially between him and the coquettish Chao Min, played by Sharla “Yee Mong” Cheung. You really want to punch her in the face, but at the same time you can’t help admiring her chutzpah. In a world of overpowered martial artists, it’s admirable to have a character who makes her way around with her wits and an understanding of human nature.

There are also a lot of cute moments between Mo-kei and his servant Siu Chiu as well, making you wonder what secret she’s harboring and if they’ll ever get together one day. I always did like Chingmy Yau’s characters. It’s too bad all three lead actresses in this movie have retired now.

Stuff that’s not so good: The lack of a conclusive ending. This is clearly part 1 of two or even three, but the film was such a bomb (unbelievable!!) and apparently Li had issues with the director, so the promised sequel never came out. Since the story is based on Jin Yong’s Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre, I know what drama I’m watching next!

The other negative is the juvenile sexual humor and a bit of bad language – from a bad character, but nevertheless. It’s only in a few brief scenes and not enough to detract from the rest of the movie as a whole, but I include it for the sake of completeness.

I should also say that the story might be a bit confusing if it’s your first time watching. There are so many faction names thrown about that it can be hard to follow. Especially for characters who are mentioned but don’t show up. I also expected some explanation for why Jet Li’s mother and Chao Min are played by the same actress (long lost relatives?) but got nothing.

Overall: Lots of great kung fu action. If you like wire-fu, you should definitely watch Kung Fu Cult Master. Great story once you get the hang of it. Very cheesy, but in a feel-good way. Highly recommended

Watching clips of Beautiful Cooking (美女廚房) online

I’ve hit the stage in my Cantonese studies where I think I’ve gone as far as textbooks and manufactured dialogues can take me. It’s time to start piling on the real media for real Hong Kong people, and what better place to start than reality TV?

Unfortunately both the streams for Guangdong TV and ATV have gone offline (and the latter one has gone bankrupt), and TVB is only available to people who live in certain countries unless you have a proxy service. I’m working on getting around that, but not too seriously because I have another option: Youtube! Because I don’t have any particular show in mind and don’t mind checking out a little bit of everything here and there, Youtube is the perfect place to start.

My first subject: Beautiful Cooking from TVB! Yes, the TVB official channel has uploaded several clips of this blatantly sexist cooking show that literally means Beautiful Girls’ Kitchen (美女廚房). It’s all about bringing young female celebrities onto the show so they can flail about pretending not to know how to cook and so the mostly-male panel can savage the results. Because it doesn’t matter how successful your film career is or how much charity work you do or how fulfilling your life is – if you can’t cook then you’re worthless as a woman </sarcasm>.

Oh, this AnimeFangirl again, always getting outraged over the slightest things, you say. Well yeah, I guess. It is a pretty entertaining show. And it’s clear the girls are playing up their helplessness and cluelessness and the guys are mugging for the camera just to be funny. They’re all actors and celebrities after all. But the underlying message is still, hmmm… why not celebrities in general? Why only female celebrities cooking to please judges who are always always men? I am woman, see me cook!

And that’s not even getting into the obligatory “Man saves day for woman” bit in every show, where at least one contestant finds herself unable to deal with a piece of raw meat or seafood and one of the (male) judges has to do it for her. For example a judge has to wrestle seafood from a tank while the lady stands back and squeals “I’m so scared!”

In another episode it’s a raw duck, and the contestant’s feminine hands are so delicate she can’t apply enough pressure to cut its head off. He-Man to the rescue. “Eek!” screams the lady as she scampers off to the side while the man does his thing. Thank you He-Man, how did women ever cook without you?

I’m all for complementarianism and do believe that God created men and women for different roles and purposes in the family, but this is just ridiculous. Luckily I’m watching this show for learning purposes and not for the social commentary – though it does say a lot about Hong Kong culture that they have such a program. Also as I said they are exaggerating for obvious effect – though it does say a lot about Hong Kong culture that they feel the need to behave in such a way.

So how much Cantonese have I learned from watching several clips of Beautiful Cooking? None, haha! Okay, I did learn the word for squid (墨魚) but that’s about it. Instead this is mainly an exercise in training myself to watch Cantonese programming without subtitles and try to get the gist of it. I’m quite happy as getting the main gist of all the clips I’ve watched so far, though it helps a lot that Hong Kongers are so lively and animated. You won’t be in any doubt about how they’re feeling, I can guarantee that.

That aside, it’s too soon to tell if watching this stuff will have an effect on my Cantonese. But I remember making leaps and bounds in my Japanese listening skills from watching lots of video clips from Hey! Hey! Hey! and Music Station on Youtube. All those vids are down now and I was already pretty good at Japanese when I started watching them, but they did help a lot. I’m hoping to get the same effect from doing a little All Cantonese All The Time for the rest of the year.

As for the Beautiful Cooking show itself, eh, it’s okay. I like cooking, I like seeing what the contestants make of the unexpected ingredients, everyone involved seems to be having a lot of fun. It’s exactly the kind of show I could watch a lot of without even meaning to. I’ve linked two episodes in this post and TVB has plenty more on Youtube, so be sure to check them out if you’re interested!

Radio/TV programs for learning Japanese and Cantonese

Why yes, I’m still learning those two languages. My Japanese is leaps and bounds ahead of my Cantonese of course, so much so that sometimes I don’t even notice that I’m reading or listening to something in Japanese because it feels so natural. But I still have a long way to go with spoken Japanese, mostly because I don’t have the chance to speak it often. That’s why I think it’s necessary to listen to Japanese radio and TV as much as possible.

While it’s true you can learn a lot of spoken Japanese from anime, the fact remains that real Japanese people don’t talk as clearly and in turn and in such orderly, sensible sentences. You want real Japanese, you have to listen to regular humans speaking it to other regular Japanese people. Which is where Japanese radio comes in.

In the past I spent a lot of time trying to find various radio stations and switching back and forth all the time (chronicled in earlier articles in this blog), but nowadays I’m busy, to start with, plus there’s much to be gained by sticking to one station (easier to remember the schedule, easier to find favorite programs and announcers, etc), so I have one go-to radio station for Japanese, and one for Cantonese.

FM Castle (Japanese) – You’ll also find it called FM Tanba in places on the internet. It’s a local radio station from Fukuchiyama in Kyoto. You can listen to the broadcast on their website or do like I do and download the asx and add it to your Windows Media Player playlist. You can also listen to them at TuneIn.

What I like about FM Castle is that during the night (Japan time) they play a lot of older Japanese music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, which I really enjoy listening to much more than modern J-Pop. The female singers in the 60s and 70s could really sing as well, beautiful clear voices all around. I keep adding new songs to my mp3 list all the time. Some of the songs are a bit, uhhh, racy though, like the old “Don’t make me take my sailor uniform off” (セーラ服を脱がさないで) songs and stuff, so once in a while I have to mute the station until they sing sometime sensible. During the day they have a lot of talk shows and interviews so you can get your regular listening practice in as well.

RTHK Radio 2 (Cantonese) – Their website stream is working again. RTHK has a lot of radio stations, which is why I have to specify Radio 2. Radio 1 is very boring, all about politics and news and more politics. Unless you’re into that sort of thing. Radio 3 is English, I believe, and then some of the other channels broadcast Mandarin only. Radio 2 is the best because it’s mostly Cantonese, and they have a very good mix of music and talk programs. I prefer the music programs like Ngo Ngoi Guangdong Go 我愛廣東歌 (I love Cantonese music) on Sundays and San gwong dai yat sin 晨光第一線 and Hing Tam Chin Cheung Bat ye Tin 輕談淺唱不夜天 at night. Very lively conversations during the day.

Guang Dong TV (Cantonese) – I don’t watch this too often, because somehow I always tend to tune in when they’re giving the news. The newscaster usually speaks in Cantonese with a Mandarin accent and a lot of Mandarin words (has to be heard to be believed) but when they interview people, those people almost always speak Mandarin so I really can’t follow along much.

Once in a while I’m lucky to watch when there’s a drama on, which is usually interesting, but then I forget to tune in the next day and then it’s back to square one. What I need to do is find the TV schedule and pick a few programs to follow. Must put that on my To Do list.

Downtown DX & Honma Deka? (Japanese) – The Japanese TV shows I used to watch to get my listening practice in. I usually just get my episodes from Youtube and don’t really care too much whether they’re in broadcast order or not. Recently I’ve stopped watching them, though. I dunno, they just seem so trivial and superficial to me. What this “talent” is wearing, what that talent ate, and the tips and ‘research’ presented on Honma Deka is always spurious and poorly-researched at best, often selected for shock factor rather than usefulness. So I’m actually on the hunt for interesting Japanese programs is anyone has any to recommend.

So that’s the learning situation right now. I can say for sure I learn a lot from listening to Japanese radio, probably because I understand about 95% of what they’re saying already. With Cantonese I just enjoy hearing it spoken, but it would help if I backed up my listening with further studies. I’m working on a new Anki deck featuring actual spoken Cantonese instead of textbook examples, I’ll talk about it one of these days. Until then, that’s the progress I’m making!

No Sweat Cantonese book review

I hadn’t read the AllJapaneseAlltheTime blog for a while, but I popped in about a month ago and one of the recent posts kind of pricked my conscience a little bit. Why Are you Acting like a Deadbeat Dad Language Learner? the title goes, and it talks about abandoning a language as soon as you’re halfway good in it. Th…that’s like me and Cantonese, I thought uncomfortably.

The truth is, I’d managed to get to a semi-decent point in Cantonese. I don’t have any language partners so I can’t speak a lick, but I’ve gotten to the place where I can get the gist and sometimes more than just the gist of what people are talking about on news broadcasts, in dramas and on RTHK 2 programs (off-topic, but does anyone else have difficulty live-streaming RTHK? I have to use the RTHK on the Go app on my phone to get the broadcasts.) Right about then I kind of ran out of Canto movies I wanted to watch and music I wanted to listen to, and it became a chore hunting for HK dramas that aren’t dubbed into Mandarin, so I just kinda threw the whole thing over and walked away. I still listen to RTHK a few times a week, watch Guangdong TV from time to time and listen to Cantopop quite frequently, but with nowhere near the energy I used to.

But since the AJATT post stirred me up, I decided to at least go through my bulging folder of Canto-learning material I’d always meant to read but never got round it. There’s quite a bit of, and I’ll try to tackle at least one or two sets a month but first up, No Sweat Cantonese: A Fun Guide to Speaking Correctly by Amy Leung. That was a long intro, wasn’t it? ^_^;; A-anyway, the blurb:

The long awaited textbook from one of the most popular and successful teachers of Cantonese. Amy Leung teaches Cantonese to managers of multinational corporations in Hong Kong in a fun new way. No Sweat Cantonese distils her approach, fulfilling the demand for an up-to-date textbook focusing on the practical needs of expatriates in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the Cantonese-speaking world. Like never before, Cantonese – “that impossible language!” is now easy and enjoyable to learn. Includes CD with pronunciation aid and full-length conversations.

The presence of audio was the selling point for me, because Cantonese is one language where it really helps to hear stuff spoken. There are sooo many homonyms in this language, it’s crazy. But anyway, since I spent so much time on the intro I’m going to put the actual review in point form to save time and hopefully stop myself rambling like I am so wont to do.

The good

Starts with a rather good pronunciation guide and using a romanization guide that makes sounding things out easy to do.
Vocabulary lists with hanzi at the start of every chapter.
Dialogues provided are short and easy to follow/repeat.
There’s a helpful appendix at the back with even more vocabulary, all voiced.
Lots of cultural notes and suggestions about places to go and things to do there, making this a good guide for people who intend to visit Hong Kong in the near future.

The bad

A bit too elementary for an intermediate learner like me. No Sweat Cantonese is better suited for those just starting out, preferably with the aid of a teacher.
There are a lot of careless typos, including one right on the contents page (see proof above).
Inconsistent typesetting annoys me. The typesetter will randomly change fonts on the same page and put accents on English words and numbers where they don’t belong at all.
The vocabulary comes with hanzi but the dialogues and chit-chat lines don’t, so there’s an extra step involved if you want to enter them into an SRS or put them on a card. It’s not too bad for an intermediate user because none of it uses complicated dialogue, but for someone just starting it out it can be intimidating. Again you’re better off working with a teacher.

tl;dr, I didn’t get too much out of it. The vocabulary lists are the best part, but I have an aversion to entering just words/characters into my SRS unless they’re in a sentence where they’re used in context, and the sentences in this book came without hanzi and I was too lazy to write them out from scratch so… yeah. At $30 on Amazon it’s a bit pricey for what you’ve get, but if you’ve got all the other Canto textbooks and need something to round out your collection and fill in a few vocab gaps it’s not a bad buy. Still, No Sweat Cantonese is probably most useful for current and future expats who have access to a language teacher and just need a structured textbook to help them through.

I found a new Cantonese TV livestream – Guangdong TV!

It’s been a while since I last posted about my Cantonese learning adventures. First I took a break from posting about it, then in the past 6 months or so I haven’t learned much at all. The reasons for that are both myriad and nebulous. What matters is that I’m finally back in the saddle and ready to take my studies seriously once more.

Thanks to the unfortunate break I have once again reverted to an intermediate-level learner just when I was on the verge of breaking through to advanced. But I learned all that stuff once and I can learn it again if I just focus my energies in the right direction. And since I do find just reading (or trying to read) about Cantonese boring, not to mention I like the sound rather than the sight of that particular language, it’s time to go back to finding good media to listen to or watch.

The bad news is, the ATV stream I used to watch all those terrible dramas on has apparently gone down for good. Boo, hiss. In fact I wondered for a second whether the company itself was still in business, but apparently they are. The good news is, I found another Cantonese TV station to watch: Guangdong TV! Yay~ I’ll even share the link with you: http://www.wcetv.com/asx/LIB/LIB106170_v5.asx

Since Guangdong is part of Mainland China and has historically been under their rule, I hear their Cantonese is more heavily influenced by Mandarin than Hong Kong/Macau Cantonese is, but a beggar like me hardly has a choice. I’ve only watched a little bit of it, but the commercials at least are in normal Cantonese, and that’s the best part of watching TV, right? ^_^ So I’m in a really good mood right now, yay!