Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion (Cantonese, Italian)

[zKing]

Re-org at work. I'm changing teams and need to ramp up on some new-to-me stuff.
Language learning activities will be a diminished for some number of weeks while I fight the chaos dragon for a while.

BBIAB.

[zKing]

So a lot has happened since my last report. The re-org at work has shuffled my team around and I'm working on some new things.
I'm still ramping on all the new services and code base owned by my new team. This has meant very little time for studying languages, sadly.

Even more exciting... my wife and I went to Hong Kong for Chinese New Year.

Hong Kong is such an interesting place from a language perspective (and many others). First of all, I got to practice my Cantonese a lot... but far more listening than speaking. As my wife is a native speaker and just generally is the girl with the plan, she did most of the speaking as we ran around the city. At first, I was actually quite disappointed with my listening skills. I was listening to my wife rapidly speak with 1-3 other people and while I could get the gist, I couldn't really participate. However, as time went on my listening skills seemed to suddenly pop to a new level. By the end of the trip, I was really hearing a lot more and able to really follow a lot, even in these rapid multi-party conversations.

Some interesting random points:
1. At first, when I would try to speak, I felt this almost unconscious urge to speak very quickly, i.e. match the speed of my wife and the others in the conversation as it felt like I didn't want suddenly slow things down. But this was a huge mistake as I would stumble over my words and end up blurting out an unintelligible mess. It felt like my speaking skills had disappeared and was very demoralizing, but once I realized I was trying to rush, I was able to slow down and get out what I was trying to say and I would do OK.

2. Almost every time I would speak Cantonese for the first time with anyone, even the most simple phrase, it would cause shock and awe and a "好犀利呀！" (i.e. Amazing!/Awesome!) While this was certainly a fun ego boost, it also was kind of a weird reaction in some situations. I mean the hotel staff and cab drivers there work daily in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. One cab driver acted like I walked on water when, in Cantonese, I asked if there was any traffic... I thought to myself: dude, you also have a good working skill in three languages, is it really THAT amazing?

3. I realized at one point, that people trying to 'simplify' their speech to me actually made it MUCH HARDER for me to understand them. When I'm listening I don't catch every word and so I grab what I can and guess the rest. The most common case of me getting caught flat footed: my wife would be with 2-3 other natives and the conversation would be ripping along, I'd be kind of following most of it. Then someone would suddenly turn to me and blurt out 2-3 syllables. I would totally blank. Later my wife would usually say they simplified the question they asked me. I realized this was actually MUCH harder for me to understand as I didn't get a full sentence to guess from or some "space" with filler words to grok the important bits. This happened at least three times.

4. Oh, and to state the obvious, having a (slowish) 30-60 min conversation with a patient iTalki tutor, even if completely in Cantonese... is nothing like being in a multi-party native free-for-all.

5. I almost filled a small suitcase with books for learning Cantonese from a great book store in Wan Chai. Some of them are bit basic for me, but whatever. At this point, I probably have almost every book in print for leaning Cantonese (some aren't in English)... there isn't a lot out there.

6. I got to see the very last concert of 張學友's tour in HK. It was awesome! I probably freaked some people out when I sang along with the lyrics. I don't think I spotted another non-Asian person there.

7. Hong Kong's history and current politics around languages is really crazy. As an ex-British colony (and the desire to continue to be part of the global stage), English is still very much a desirable language. Mandarin is both pushed from above and recognized (begrudgingly by some) as necessary. The Cantonese mother tongue, while mostly seen as 'useless' by many, is getting a slight resurgence of interest from people who fear losing their mother tongue. There are more websites and such that are interested in preserving the heritage. It seems that schools teach English and "Chinese" which pretty much means the written language and Mandarin. I don't know about the success of the schools with Mandarin, but English ability seems all over the map. Most who 'need' to know it (the aforementioned cab drivers, hotel staff, big store staff) do just fine, some have great English skills, others not so much.

8. Odd thing: We noticed that many in HK, when sending texts on their phone, use broken English rather than Chinese. When we asked my wife's family about it, they said that many people don't know how to type in Chinese (they would have to hand write with their finger which takes too long), so English is 'easier'. But ironically many of these texts were quite difficult to understand for us English speakers. (My wife and I would sometimes spend quite some time trying to decode the meaning of some messages sent to us.) When I showed my wife's family the jyutping input on my phone, it became clear that I could type Chinese on my phone easier than they could.
(HK people aren't taught any kind of phonetic system for Cantonese, so something like jyutping input would not be any use to them. Some will learn Mandarin's pingyin, however and they can get by that way...)

9. When I got back, I noticed a massive upgrade in my listening abilities. I didn't think this would happen in just 2.5 weeks time. And the whole time my wife and I used English with each other... so it wasn't even _complete_ immersion. But I also realized that previously I almost never seriously attempted to listen to anything without subtitles (beyond my iTalki lessons and half-heartedly listening to a podcast in the car). I'm now convinced that I need to listen without subtitles a lot more often (have a balance between with and without)... I'm also now at a level where this would be a lot more productive than before. I think I was reading the subs a lot more than listening in many cases.

So now that all of my carefully laid plans have blown up, and my free time has been drastically cut, I'm not working toward any of the previous goals for now. I'll also unlikely be able to spend quite so much time here posting for a while (although guilty pleasure reading in dead time is still fair game.) But I will grab dribs and drabs of language practice as opportunities appear.

I've been mulling over some ideas around chorusing sentences ala Ollie Kjellin, as I realize my speaking of even well known sentences isn't as fluid as I'd like, but I'm not sure if that will come to anything any time soon...

Until next time (which might be a while)... Onward!

[Purangi]

I really enjoy reading your experience learning Cantonese, and I hope you’ll keep posting about your progress!

[Axon]

Wonderful entry as usual, and I'm so happy you had such success with Cantonese in Hong Kong! Also it runs counter to my own (limited) experience of using (very limited) Cantonese there - just a handful of people remarked on it at all. Yours was clearly more deserving of compliments at any rate.

I thought you had already incorporated short-loop chorusing quite heavily into your routine? What else are you considering doing, or how do you see Olle Kjellin's method as different from what you'd been working on?

[zKing]

Wonderful entry as usual, and I'm so happy you had such success with Cantonese in Hong Kong! Also it runs counter to my own (limited) experience of using (very limited) Cantonese there - just a handful of people remarked on it at all. Yours was clearly more deserving of compliments at any rate.

I thought you had already incorporated short-loop chorusing quite heavily into your routine? What else are you considering doing, or how do you see Olle Kjellin's method as different from what you'd been working on?

1. HK people's reaction to my speaking: I think part of it, frankly, is a negative stereotype about mixed race couples... white husband/HK wife in particular. I think HK natives saw a lot of British/Westerners who lived in HK, had a Cantonese girlfriend or wife of many years, and the guy wouldn't know more than 5 words of Cantonese (and couldn't pronounce them properly at that). And in my situation, my wife would come up and start to chat away while I was silent for a bit, so it would look like she was translating for us. In addition, it would usually become obvious fairly quickly that we were from the US (reducing the probability I'd bother to learn even more)... then I'd say something in Cantonese and completely throw off their expectations. Plus I'm a middle aged 6'4" chubby white guy who dresses in Seattle casual, so I likely don't give off an air of 'worldliness' and look like a typical monolingual American. I think for someone younger, single and clearly going to places outside the usual tourist hot spots, they might think you are some kind of academic/world traveler who definitely will try to learn a bit of the local languages.

2. Chorusing: I did do some chorusing a few months back, but I didn't stick with it. But after my trip, I realize that one thing I need to do (among many) to improve my speaking is greatly reduce the conscious effort I'm using to mechanically produce sentences, i.e. separate from grammar/word choice... and hopefully I get a bump in my speaking speed as a side effect. To put it another way, even for sentences/phrases that my brain can automatically produce easily, correctly and knowing all the correct tones... they come to mind almost in 'written form'. I then mentally hand them to the 'pronouncing machine' which, right now, moves at a relatively slow pace and takes a bit too much conscious care to run. I want to both make the 'pronouncing machine' faster and more efficient as well as reduce the mental separation between what my brain generates for output and the physical pronouncing of it. I'm thinking that a boat load of chorusing is likely a good method to make that happen. (I think it is also interesting that the most automatic 2-3 sentences I can say came from Pimsleur Cantonese.)
That thought got me reading around about chorusing, lexical chunks, etc... and I bumped into the posts about Olle Kjellin. I do believe he's onto something. I also think that if you are saying a phrase/sentence out loud and you know the meaning of every part of it in that moment... this activity is bound to push the elements of that bit of language a tiny bit deeper into your brain. This is similar to the many reports of people saying they remember words better when they've written them out by hand. I've got a good sized pile of 'sentences with audio' type material (old format Glossika, Interesting Cantonese 1-5, etc.), so I have thousands of sentences I can use for the task.

Now I just need to make a short plan, steal some time and do the work.

[Flickserve]

You got to see 張學友 last concert? How did you manage to get tickets?

Blimey. That must have been a blast. Did he sing mainly Cantonese or Mandarin songs? The first concerts in HK about a year and a half ago were in Cantonese. I got to see that. He went on the world tour. London was mainly Mandarin. This series in HK was mandarin. But I can imagine that the very last concert being mainly Cantonese.

], I realize that one thing I need to do (among many) to improve my speaking is greatly reduce the conscious effort I'm using to mechanically produce sentences, i.e. separate from grammar/word choice... and hopefully I get a bump in my speaking speed as a side effect. To put it another way, even for sentences/phrases that my brain can automatically produce easily, correctly and knowing all the correct tones... they come to mind almost in 'written form'. I then mentally hand them to the 'pronouncing machine' which, right now, moves at a relatively slow pace and takes a bit too much conscious care to run. I want to both make the 'pronouncing machine' faster and more efficient as well as reduce the mental separation between what my brain generates for output and the physical pronouncing of it.

I had this same difficulty with Mandarin and French (much more so from school French). But no problem with Cantonese as I learnt it by almost totally listening and only after I knew the word by listening, did I then match it up to the written character. For example 好犀利 characters are something I knew only after 18 years with the language! So I think it is a direct relationship to the time you put into listening the text.

Chorusing is a good idea. To be honest, I think glossika Cantonese is pretty good , it's a male voice and the names are read out exactly how native speakers say non Cantonese names. It is not quite connected speech in the way that some locals would use the language but I think that's not a bad thing to learn each word properly.

With my Mandarin, I do hardly any reading. I know it's supposed to increase your vocabulary a lot. The danger is what you read in your mind is not the correct pronunciation. So what I do with my Mandarin sentences is listen first, tease out the individual words aurally and then look at the characters for confirmation. The trade off is I am not picking up vocabulary fast as I should. The supposed benefit is that I have a better idea of matching my pronunciation to native speaker flow from the listening and chorusing.

I agree with what you say about online lessons. The teachers dumb it down so that learners can understand more. I can't see any way around this if your fluency is still difficult unless you join in a group conversation with native speakers , record five minutes of conversation and then post mortem it afterwards. I suppose improving pronunciation and speed of speech can help a lot with online lessons. I did a couple of online Cantonese and we basically speak at a normal speed.

[zKing]

I wanted to respond back, but it took me a bit to find the time...

You got to see 張學友 last concert? How did you manage to get tickets?

Yeah, that was a bit stressful to pull off. We tried to buy tickets online when they first went on sale, but got nothing but server busy messages for 3-4 hours before they all sold out. So my wife's cousin pointed us at a ticket resell site (https://www.viagogo.com/?) and we used her HK address for delivery. We were nervous that they were going to be fake tickets, and we had to pay something like 2x-3x face value... but it turned out fine. This was a "bucket list" type thing for us and I don't know that we'll ever get another chance to see him in concert, so the price and risk was painful but worth it for us.

Blimey. That must have been a blast. Did he sing mainly Cantonese or Mandarin songs?

I'd say it was 75% Cantonese songs. His catalog is so large that he did a medley at the end to run through something like 10 songs he probably couldn't fit full length into an already pretty long concert. It was an absolutely fantastic show, and as a hobbyist musician I can say that his voice was pretty dang powerful and his control was great --- there was no attempt to hide his voice behind a wall of music, background singers or wash of reverb; they mixed him very loud and forward and he was able to hold his own and carry the show. There were only a couple moments where he'd cut a high trailing note a bit short, but IMO he is still 歌神. I think they said this was concert #230 for this tour, breaking yet another record.

I had this same difficulty with Mandarin and French (much more so from school French). But no problem with Cantonese as I learnt it by almost totally listening and only after I knew the word by listening, did I then match it up to the written character. For example 好犀利 characters are something I knew only after 18 years with the language! So I think it is a direct relationship to the time you put into listening the text.
[...]
With my Mandarin, I do hardly any reading. I know it's supposed to increase your vocabulary a lot. The danger is what you read in your mind is not the correct pronunciation. So what I do with my Mandarin sentences is listen first, tease out the individual words aurally and then look at the characters for confirmation. The trade off is I am not picking up vocabulary fast as I should. The supposed benefit is that I have a better idea of matching my pronunciation to native speaker flow from the listening and chorusing.

Yes, I think both my experience and yours show the same old bit wisdom: You get out of it what you put into it.
I.e. the skills you develop will always be skewed based on the methods you use. I'd guess that ~75% of all my time with Cantonese was spent watching Cantonese videos with Standard Written Chinese subtitles. (And honestly, I'd often unintentionally gave WAY more attention to trying to slowly decode the subtitles and pick out the vocab vs listening to the full sentences in the audio.) The remainder of my time was mostly vocabulary cramming of one form or another with not much left for other activities like iTalki conversations. So my reading and vocabulary are pretty decent, my listening skills are just OK and my speaking lags behind like a neglected step child.