Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Aug 02, 2022 4:03 pm

DaveAgain wrote:Steve Kaufmann has a how I learnt Cantonese video that you might find interesting.


Thanks! I don't think I've watched that one.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Tue Aug 02, 2022 5:17 pm

Axon wrote:
I think a low-stress approach for you, assuming a Cantonese track, would be:
- Pimsleur Cantonese to start
<- at this point you will have exceeded the expectations of any of your extended family
- Assimil Le Cantonais and FSI Cantonese simultaneously (alternating days?)
<- at this point you will have surpassed the vast majority of foreigners who start learning Cantonese
- OPLingo Cantonese Conversations (yes, it's cool young adults from Hong Kong in 2021, but it's not wrong Cantonese, just a little different)
- The Basic and Intermediate Cantonese textbooks by Yip and Matthews
- Hundreds of hours of Cantonese-language media on YouTube - ask your extended family for recommendations :D
<- at this point you will have a stronger command of Cantonese than many young adults in the Cantonese-speaking diaspora


Since you clearly know your stuff, what would you recommend as a low stress approach for Mandarin? It was my mom’s foreign language, and I grew up in the Bay Area with her speaking Mandarin to shopkeepers and waiters. (I know Cantonese is the predominate Chinese language in San Francisco, but she still somehow found Mandarin speakers. I’m not sure exactly how that worked.) Europe will always be my primary language focus, but I’ve dabbled in Chinese before and I would like to do more in the future, but not in an all encompassing way. More of a stay connected to my mom sort of way.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby Axon » Tue Aug 02, 2022 8:01 pm

Lawyer&Mom wrote:What would you recommend as a low stress approach for Mandarin?


In order to not draw the discussion away from sfuqua and his happy news, for anyone who is interested, my answer is in my log.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby Teango » Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:16 pm

Congratulations to your son and on gaining a daughter-in-law, sfuqua!

As Axon already suggested, learning a handful of useful Chinese phrases well will already greatly impress the new in-laws. I suggest you focus chiefly on developing native-like pronunciation and fluency with a very very small set to start off proceedings. Just ensure you double-check which language/dialect they speak first, and no matter how tempted or inebriated, don't break out the Japanese if you get lost (this will most likely earn you a demerit *lol*). The rest will come with daily study and practice if you decide to go down that road. No more dilly-dallying now, it's time to fill up your cup...you've got this! 8-)

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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby snowflake » Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:59 pm

Congratulations!

I looked up Zhuhai. Given it’s location and that you’re dealing with some of the Chinese diaspora population in San Francisco, ask your daughter-in-law what language to learn. There may be smatterings of other languages/dialects among the Chinese relatives which may make the journey rather interesting.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby RyanSmallwood » Wed Aug 03, 2022 2:10 am

STT44 wrote:I
As you said, everybody in your new family understands and can communicate in Mandarin.

Mandarin is huge in comparison to Cantonese, both in terms of the number of speakers and the amount of learning resources.

Let's face it, learning both Mandarin AND Cantonese to a high level would easily take you 5-10 years of near-full time study. So why not settle for something that gives you more mileage?

Well if you double check, sfuqua mentioned not everyone in the family speaks Mandarin really well, and if the goal is to try to get beyond just getting by communicating, learning everyone's native language will be more helpful than just another language of communication.

Cantonese isn't exactly a small language either, it has more than enough beginner resources, a ton of good ones were already mentioned and I could mention tons more if they were absolutely necessary. Cantonese is also really well known for its film television and radio media options, Mandarin produces more now, but Cantonese has definitely had the bigger overall impact in terms of major films and filmmakers. (And personally as someone really interested in film history, I'd say Cantonese films are some of my all time favorites.) Of course learning Mandarin is really rewarding and useful in tons of ways too, but Cantonese shouldn't be thought of as getting "less mileage", because it has tons to offer that you can't get from Mandarin.

Where I think studying Cantonese can be a bit tricky is the intermediate phase, not that there isn't enough resources, but you can't be as flexible as you can with Mandarin resources. Sfuqua has one advantage here though in having access to a bunch of native speakers which will potentially make it easier to keep progressing with the language. I also find that while Mandarin and Cantonese aren't super close, they're similar enough that learning one does make learning the other substantially easier. So if he finds it tricky to keep progressing through the intermediate phase and wants to incorporate some Mandarin resources it shouldn't be too much of an issue to start incorporating it.

That's why I suggest starting with Cantonese to start communicating with the family ASAP, and long term there's always the option of incorporating Mandarin resources if there's need/interest.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby sfuqua » Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:42 am

There is a wealth of material for learning Cantonese. There is a ridiculous amount of material for learning Mandarin. The ease of finding material pulls me toward Mandarin. I still haven't figured out what I want to do, but I have found a ton of interesting shared anki decks that I intend to play around with. I think that putting on anki for a few cards a day might be a good way to slowly, slowly break into reading. This will take focus and concentration eventually, but oral work comes first. I've got to talk to grandma, or at least make her know that I am trying to talk to her. I talked to my new daughter-in-law today at lunch, and she said that Cantonese is the standard family language, but that everybody knows Mandarin, especially the younger people. She said that part of her family in China is very traditional, not super sophisticated and Westernised at all.

I'm going to work through Pimsleur Cantonese and Pimsleur Mandarin first. I'm not sure yet, but I think I am going to run the Pimsleur files through Audacity to cut out the pauses, so that I can just shadow the files like Prof Arguelles. Without the pauses, I can get through a couple of lessons a day, and review the daylights out of the lessons as I go through them. I think that being on a 9 month schedule to get through Pimsleur may make more sense than the 3-month schedule they claim you can do. I can putter with anki decks while fooling with Pimsleur. After Pimsleur, I can do Assimil, maybe. I'd sure like to find the Le Cantonais book by Assimil.

There are many resources that have been suggested that I haven't even tried yet.

My wife is from the Philippines, so she has her own cultural structures to work through the world, and when she had met most of the new, Chinese part of the family that is in San Francisco, she immediately went over and started trying to make sure that E's grandmother had a drink, and got enough to eat, and all of that stuff that a woman of the younger generation "should" do for a woman of the older generation in the Philippines. She was a hit, even though Grandma had already been being taken care of very well. At the end of our visit, grandma and my wife spent about 5 minutes trying to talk, and got nowhere. Grandma finally came over, got all teary-eyed and hugged my wife.

There was communication, but we can do better, even with a few Pimsleur lessons.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby frenchfish55 » Thu Aug 11, 2022 11:29 am

DaveAgain wrote:
sfuqua wrote: Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. :D
I think you should prioritize learning how to eat with chopsticks.
:-)

Ha-ha. You make my day.
Is there possibilty that the thread started will be my Father in law, so I would like to teach him Russian.
For the Lord sake. How many spare time should honorable man have to learn Mandarin?
By the way. Do you think that your new chineese family will be responsible for that you was @forced@ by yourself to learn Chineese?
Why don't just help your family to learn english and invite them to this forum?
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Aug 12, 2022 11:32 pm

Congrats!

Have fun with this new endeavor!
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby crush » Mon Aug 15, 2022 10:10 pm

sfuqua, congrats! I recently got married to a native Cantonese speaker and have been trying to convince my parents to learn some Cantonese as well.

I would be interested to see where you find the Assimil course, it seems to have had a short lifespan and is only available on Ebay for hundreds of dollars (the mp3 audio is still available for purchase though).

Axon's post sounds like a solid plan. Personally, i used Glossika and the Basic/Intermediate grammar books from Routledge they mentioned for the bulk of my studies. Those books are great and i can highly recommend them. Glossika isn't for everyone but i personally really enjoy their courses (as they were originally presented). I had to ask my partner about a few sentences and was coming at it with a strong background in Mandarin, it may be more difficult with no previous experience in Chinese languages.

In addition to the OPLingo (now Language Crush) Cantonese Conversations -- which are an absolutely amazing resource, leosmith is a true hero! -- i can also highly recommend Olly Richards' Cantonese Conversations.

Also, we've been paying translators to create matching, colloquial subtitles for Cantonese shows and movies (nearly 100% of subtitles are in "SWC"/Standard Written Chinese, essentially Mandarin, and do not match what the speakers are saying). Those are available here.
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