The Secret of Cantonese

If Cantonese has a secret, it is this: from the moment you begin learning it, you're picking up slang, without even realising it.

Like English, Cantonese is blessed with a gargantuan amount of slang. But unless you learn to read and write traditional Chinese while learning to speak Cantonese, you will incorporate slang and think it's correct.

And it is correct; therein lies the trouble.

For example, yat man (一 蚊), the Cantonese words for 'a dollar', were among the first words I learned. If you say that to anyone from Hong Kong, they know exactly what you mean (provided the tones are correct, but that's another matter).

For the longest time I thought the word man (蚊) was the word for dollar. It isn't; its true definition is mosquito. Only in slang does it mean dollar.

Why mosquito? You might as well ask why English uses words such as beans, bones or Benjamins.

Now you can't say yat man if you really mean 'one mosquito', because in that case, Cantonese requires an intermediary word: a noun classifier specific to the noun it's quantifying (don't fret, I'm not about to delve into that further).

You could argue that people learning English as a second language also pick up slang as they go, and I wouldn't dispute that. But unless they're avoiding the classroom and only learning street English, they're reaping the benefits of learning the alphabet, grammar and so on. Instructors aren't going to teach foreign students that 'buck' is the proper word for 'dollar', and leave it at that (and even if they did the student would learn the truth in no time).

But that's what happens in Cantonese. The formal, written word for dollar is yuhn (元). It might appear on a menu, but if you haven't learned to read Chinese you won't know it's the correct word, and no one will tell you otherwise because everyone who speaks Cantonese uses man (蚊). I can't recall ever hearing anyone use yuhn (元) when reading a price tag aloud. Even my wife confirmed no one uses it.

That's just the way it is.

One benefit of learning to read Chinese would be that my vocabulary and fluency would be vastly improved. I'd be better able to distinguish between what I see on the page and what I hear people say, but it would make little difference in how I speak. Like everyone else, I'd see yuhn (元) but say man (蚊).

Therefore, if the secret to Cantonese is that slang is king, the secret to learning Cantonese is to understand that even though you may not be getting the whole picture, it doesn't much matter.

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