Category: Cantonese

Two more radio programs

This time for Japanese. I scribbled them down on my noticeboard, but I forgot to note which programs they were. Knowing myself, they’re almost certainly music programs, most likely Japanese 60s, 70s and 80s classics, because that’s what I listen to the most. Anyway, they’re both on Sankakuyama FM, Wednesdays at 8pm GMT and Fridays at 9pm GMT. I used to really like Sankakuyama FM because they had a great mix of music and talk, and because their stream was fairly low quality it could stream on my slow connection without a hitch.

Unfortunately the other day I started listening and there was this right-wing guy on spouting all this racist crap about Koreans and Russians and how they think they’re better than everyone else, and that kind of pissed me off. I know Japan’s been having trouble with Russia lately, but to cast aspersion in all Russians because of that is the height of ignorance. So yeah, I’ve been souring on them a bit lately, but I still listen when that idiot isn’t on.

Cantonese is going well, I’m up to Lesson 23 of Teach Yourself Cantonese! And I finally learned to say “computer” and “fax machine” (actually I’d already learned them elsewhere, but let’s pretend I hadn’t), but not “internet” or “e-mail”. I’ve been going at a pretty good pace, but yesterday I wasn’t up to it and skipped a day of review. Yikes, 180+ items backed up in my SRS! I’m still catching up even now.

Interesting radio program

I haven’t found any good Cantonese TV programs I like, but I have found one radio program I follow quite regularly. It’s a radio drama they play on Thursdays at 6pm GMT on RTHK1, after which they play a lot of music. I haven’t figured out the overall story yet, but I find that I’m understanding more and more every week. I only caught the last few minutes of this weeks, but a lady running a stall called a young girl over and tried to sell her something. The young girl refused repeatedly and eventually ran off. And…that was the end of it. Well, at least I got that much, right? laughing Small victories, small victories.

KLM in-flight entertainment and more

I took a couple of flights with KLM over the holidays. Being in the air is no excuse for keeping up with your language skills, so I took a look at what they have on offer. Their in-flight entertainment options are pitiful compared to Emirates, so I wouldn’t pick them for a long-haul flight, but the price was good and they actually traveled when a lot of airlines were cancelling flights, plus I felt very safe with them so I’m not complaining.

First they had this “Learn a language” program apparently given to them by Berlitz. It’s extremely basic though, just a few words like “Good morning” and “Help me”, nothing interesting for any serious language learner. The real problem with them for Cantonese was some random, crazy romanization system they pulled from goodness knows where. I really should have written down some examples because they were horrible. Think of something like “fay gai chong” for airport “fei gei cheung”, stuff that none of the common systems would ever write. And I hear Berlitz charge a lot of money for their programs. Is this the kind of useless lesson buyers typically get for their money? Sad.

The other thing I did was to see what kind of movies they were showing. I managed to find two in Cantonese, “Adventure of the King” about an Emperor who goes gallivanting around town and loses his memory, and “City Under Siege“, supposedly featuring a circus troop that has gone crazy and can only be stopped by the clown. Only in Hong Kong films, guys. My intention was to watch both of them, but after the first 20 minutes or so of “Adventure of the King”, I was so bored and sleepy I couldn’t keep going. They weren’t even trying hard to be funny, I guess they just assumed the setting would work for them or something. And it just dragged on and on with the silliness instead of moving the story forward. Maybe I’ve just outgrown mo lei tau? Dunno, I still like Stephen Chow though.

So essentially all four flights passed without me getting any serious learning done. At least I got home safely and my other studies are going well, right? That’s what really counts.

Canto-ing it up!

I mentioned last time that I was adding vocabulary items from my JLPT studies to my SRS. I did that, got a nice healthy number of items. There was an unfortunate side effect from inputting them as just kanji and kanji compounds though. What happens is that I always go straight from working on my Cantonese items to reviewing my JLPT words, and then I get completely confused and try to read them in Cantonese. Stuff like 膨張 looks completely Cantonese, doesn’t it? It takes me several minutes to reorient myself every time.

Apart from that, everything’s going swimmingly. I’m not even letting the Christmas holidays distract me (though I did skip SRSing on Christmas day). As a matter of fact, I’m starting to see the lack of Cantonese learning material as a clear advantage instead of a disadvantage these days. When you start learning a language with a ton of resources, there’s the temptation to spend days and weeks and months just gathering material, reading reviews, discussing best approaches, etc., etc., with fellow learners.

With Cantonese there’s very little to talk about, you just take what you’re lucky to get and dive in. There’s a limit to how many Canto-learning blogs and forums you can waste time on, and fellow Canto learners tend to be at a relatively low level so you can’t spend all day feeling intimidated either. It’s pretty swell.

So without much ado, back to Teach Yourself Cantonese! I try not to put too much pressure on myself, but I want to be done with that book by March, God willing. I skipped along to the end and there’s a ton of vocabulary in there so I should be pretty far ahead by the time I’m done with it. After that, well, we’ll see.

Cantonese movies!

I had two flights on Emirates Airlines over the weekend, so since I was trapped in that uncomfortable metal box for almost 15 hours total, I decided to spend it studying. So I chose to watch the Cantonese in-flight entertainment and listen to Cantopop on the music station. September is Jacky Cheung month! And there was Sam Hui and Anita Mui as well! They also have an awesome Japanese selection as well, 15 hours wasn’t enough to listen to most of it. The movies I watched were both pretty bad though.

The first one was “Future X-Cops” (未來警察 in Cantonese) starring Andy Lau. What a horrible film. The premise is like Terminator mixed with all the other Back-to-the-Future kind of films, except it’s all over the place and doesn’t even make much sense. Basically Andy’s wife gets killed in 2080 trying to foil an attempt on a Professor’s life. Afterwards he’s sent back in time to protect that Professor as a kid because the assassins have gone back to try and kill him. There are so many problems with the premise that I don’t even know where to start, but it’s all good because the story takes second place to the horrible, horrible effects, bad acting and lame attempts at comedy. I really like Andy Lau, but if he thinks this is a good movie he needs to retire, like, yesterday.

The second movie was called “Beauty on Duty.” Clever name for a rather dumb movie. It’s a Hong Kong remake of Sandra Bullock’s “Miss Congeniality”, not exactly the best movie in the world to begin with. The writers decided to give it a mo lei tau spin, so it’s a silly, hokey hodgepodge of misadventures: electronic crocodiles, ‘Genetic Self-Control Disposition’, running around with a dead body, etc. That sort of thing. Eventually the bad guys are foiled with no loss of life and everything ends happily ever after. I suppose.

There was a third movie running called “Hot Summer Days”, but after the fail that was the first two, I decided to stick to music and napping instead. After all, learning a language isn’t about forcing yourself to do things you normally wouldn’t. It’s about having fun. Right?