Cantonese is what we spoke at home growing up.  English is what we learned in school.  Mandarin is what I learned throughout high school and college dating girls who spoke Mandarin and also doing business in China afterwards really helped a lot.  My Cantonese is as fluent as my English.  Listening-wise, I can understand about 80% and I can express myself 100% of the time but using simple phrases and language.  Mandarin is not the hardest language to learn, but it is tough on hard core native Cantonese speakers because of the "shock" to their native tongue.  For ABC's, it's much easier, especially once you learn the Pin Yin aspect.

key difference between canto and mando is that mando only has 4 "tones" (or is it 5?). whilst canto has 7-8????

thats why it may be harder for some bros to pick it up...

4 tones for mando.  no idea about canto.  anywhere from 6-9 depending on who you talk to.  annoying as hell to be quite honest if you're not a native.  can never hear the tones, esp when people don't know how to tell you what to listen for.  too bad mando isn't actually as useful/practical in your daily life as you'd think in HK.  so much easier

Cantonese is a hell of a language if you are not a native speaker.  I have friends who still can not differentiate from certain words like, "yau"...  to have, oil, paint, to pull up (as in pants), or "gau" as in #9, dog, enough, dick, old.  Cantonese is a bitch of a language.

Mando has 4 tones (5 if you count the one without any accents) and apparently Canto has 8 (i'm told).  The problem is that mando and canto tones don't overlap, so if you know both languages, it's 12 tones you can distinguish from.  The other problem is that Canto is much more colloquial.  There are a lot of shortcuts/slangs that you don't see in formal writing.  That being said, the key is to learn written Chinese.  Mando sticks to it a lot more, making it easier to learn (and less tones also helps).  In canto, written and spoken are very different.

Luckily, my parents had the foresight to make me learn mandarin to pick up the written language while i grew up in a western city.  At home, of course, i would speak canto to them.  Oh and yes, French is useless, i ditched it for mandarin when i got the chance i wish my mandarin is better though, i'd like it to be at college level.

french is def not useless, my friend.  it's prob one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.  we just are not in a part of the world that really requires french.  if you did a shit load of bizdown in africa like some of my buddies, you'd be using french as much as english.

I too learned French and am pretty decent in it too. It is fucking USELESS LOL!  I think I scored a 98 on the French Regents in High School.  I swear, the only time I have ever used it was once when some French tourists were asking for directions in pathetic English and I was able to show them the way in French.  I've never been to Africa but I have been to areas that speak Creole but even then, they would rather speak English.

Hey comatose. We seeem to be from a similar background. Maybe I know you?

I'm gonna take Mandarin lessons now. It'll be an important asset.

Well, I was also one of those 'stupid/silly' kids who decided to take French instead of Mandarin back in high school... except that I almost never go to a part of the world that speaks French and if I do, I'm so out of practice, its really not much use, whereas Mandarin seems so much more useful for my mongering hobby, lol.

But I am fluent in spoken Cantonese and know a little Mandarin, possibly just enough to get by if its spoken slow enough and I am find it tough learning Mandarin!

BUT what i'm really trying to get at is that I can understand a HK person speaking Mandarin much more than someone from China speaking Mandarin. Because as mentioned before, there is definitely something different about it!!

I too wish all those years doing French were Putonghua instead... but alas, only German and French were offered where I went to school. Oh, and Latin as well...

You understand a HK person speaking it better because they basically speak proper Cantonese with a skew... LOL...  I understand most people who speak Mandarin with the exception of China News.  The local NYC mandarin channel is pretty easy to listen to.  I think the biao jun putonghua is supposed to be some Northern Dialect, like on China News.  I could understand about 50% of the news while watching the tube, but if I am not watching? Forget about it, I would be lucky if I understood 5%  But when I watch Taiwan news, I can catch 90% of what is being said and if I am actually watching the television, I am pretty much in the 99% mark.  Taiwan mandarin is much more WHITE, than Beijing Putonghua.

well now in nyc i think you have know to mandarin these days. almost all the chinese people that i come across speak only mandarin. it seems like the last 5 to 6 year people from china all came here. i remember before you could hardly find anyone that speaks it. how the time have change. we should one day meet up and talk mandarin to annoy the hell out of each other

>> we should one day meet up and talk mandarin to annoy the hell out of each other

heh heh that's pretty funny.  I used to annoy the SO all the time when I spoke to my mother in Taishanese instead of Cantonese.  I guess it was because Taishanese is close enough to Cantonese such that it is hard to tell whether I'm saying things to talk behind her back, or if I'm fucking up the Cantonese. Actually I would get irritated when I hear HK people trying to speak Taishanese to me because it was obvious that they weren't really from Taishan and it reeked more of the appearance that they were mocking me more than anything.

In NYC nowadays, my guess is that you probably hear a lot more Fujianese more than anything because of all the illegals from Fujian that have made their way to NYC.  

Even though I consider myself quite conversational in Cantonese, I still find myself struggling with Cantonese TV news, and with Cantonese songs.  That's because both tend to use words you don't use in everyday conversation.  

I actually understand a Guangdong person's Cantonese a tad bit better than a HK person's Cantonese.  The reason why is that HK tend to take more liberties with consonants.  For really simple examples, HK folks tend to put more 'l' sounds into words, such as you (你) by saying "lei" instead of "nei"; omitting consonants, ie. a word like love (愛) "oi" instead of "ngoi".  I find that Guangdong Cantonese is a bit more what you would learn at school, more than HK Cantonese.

I now run across Mandarin speakers wherever I go in the world. The old Taishan and Cantonese speaking first wave of Chinese emigrants to the West have been completely overwhelmed by a flood of Mandarin-speaking new arrivals. All of the West-coast Chinese communities are now predominantly Mandarin speaking; and because the vast majority of Chinese living in Europe are recent arrivals, they speak Mandarin as well. Even in HK the change has been remarkable. When I first visited HK in the late 70's, nobody spoke Mandarin and the general attitude seemed to be that only dumb Mainland hicks bothered with it. Now everybody is falling all over themselves trying to get up to speed in the national dialect.

And I totally agree with my bro Sexpert: the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan is much clearer and more easily understood than what is spoken in Beijing. In fact, I would say that what Beijing people speak could almost be considered a sub-dialect of Mandarin in that it contains all sorts of peculiar expressions incomprehensible to outsiders. When speaking directly to me I have no problem, but when Beijingers talk among themselves in that rapid-fire way they have, twisting and distorting the pronunciation of every character, it can be a chore to follow what's being said.

[ Last edited by  Marsupial at 13-8-2009 22:29 ]

Well, since you are toisan, you can really pick up on the minor differences between guangdong and HK cantonese.  I too get annoyed when HK girls say "aw" (mine) instead of "ngor", or "dei nun" instead of "dei lung" for retarded.  

The biggest difference between the two is when curses start flying, Guang zhou people especially like to use the word "hai" pussy and HK people like to use the word "lun" dick.

Example, guandong people love to say, Hai yerng "pussy face" when HKers like to say "lun yerng- dick face"
or when they want to express more, they will say either ho lun dor or ho hai dor...  etc...

As for people speaking Cantonese in NYC back in the day...  a Honger could not get a decent meal or vegetables or fish in NYC in the 60's and 70's.  One had to speak Toisanese.  The funniest shit which was actually true is when the Toisan people in NYC refused to serve people who didn't speak Toisanese.  One would ask for something in Cantonese and the toisan person would say, "ew nek ma gor hoy, hong yin mmm hiew hong wah!?"  roughly translated, FUCK YOUR MOTHER'S PUSSY, CHINESE PERSON CAN'T SPEAK CHINESE!?  As if Toisan was the main dialect of China! LOL... too funny.

That all changed once Sam Hui came on the scene, Cantonese became the norm and the toisan dialect began to fade.

Although I am not Toisanese, I am able to speak and understand it perfectly because I grew up with all toisanese kids.  Hell, I could even tell the difference between umping, hoy ping, and toisan.  And yeah, I spit when i speak toisan.

ah, you guys are prob complaining about the "er hua" spoken by the northeasterners of china, not just in beijing.  you get used to it if you spend enough time around it, unless the person has a ridiculous accent.

well i might be way off mark here on why more people speak mandarin now. i believe since cantonese music have been nearly gone missing recently. and majority of the music is in mandarin imho that are good. i do find my self listing to more mandarin music these days. do you guys think it had any effect on it? as we all know chinese people loves singing no matter how horrible they might sound.

I think the reason why there is more Mandarin music nowadays is because the market of Mandarin speakers i.e. China is much much bigger.  Same goes with big-name movies. All of Jackie Chan, CYF and Stephen Chow movies in the past 10 years or so have been geared with internationalization in mind.

Whether that has an effect on more people speaking Mandarin, I don't know.  I tend to think it's simply more that China has come out of its shell since the mid 80's.

Also right now Mandarin music is just better than Hong Kong's repetative watered-down recycled crap.  

I would be more than happy to listen to Cantonese music and to watch Cantonese movies if they were actually good.  Years ago they actually were.  But right now places like Taiwan are doing a better job at entertainment than we are.  Taiwan has many talented young musicians who write and perform their own music.  Hong Kong has... Joey.

It's not just the size of the Chinese market that is making this new move to the mandarin audience.  Actually, with all the pirate copies in the mainland, the market isn't as big as everyone thinks right now.  The main point is that locally people are nolonger willing to pay for the rubbish that local companies produce.  It is not worth paying $100 for 10 recycled local songs.  Once the consumer get used to downloading everything for free, it becomes hard to get them to pay for the discs again.  Filmmakers especially have no choice but to go to mainland companies.

For movies, when working with mainland companies, local filmmakers get guaranteed investment that they wouldn't get from Hong Kong backers.  They just need to follow a few rules to keep their Chinese bosses happy.

totally with you there, bro.  i used to really like HK entertainment when i was younger.  had its own flairand what not, but there's been no attempt to improve.  w/o even talking about music, just look at the TV shows.  it's no wonder people started watching a lot of taiwanese, mainland and korean dramas when tv productions look like they did in the 80s.  the only thing that changed was picture quality.  effects are the same, and acting and scripts have arguably gotten worse.