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

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

Postby Flickserve » Sat Nov 19, 2022 9:29 am

sfuqua wrote:Well, as I understand, everybody except for Grandma and Grandpa can speak pretty good Mandarin, but everybody speaks Cantonese as their native language. E, my new daughter-in-law, only learned her Mandarin from "Chinese school" but speaks Cantonese like a native.
The family is centred in Zhuhai, so as I look at the map, it is right in the middle of the whole Guangdong business region.
I would say that I need to learn Cantonese, and that I can learn Mandarin later, if at all. :D

It seems to me that my first goal should be to learn to speak Cantonese. Then I can do more. D


This. Absolutely. Zhuhai is Cantonese. When you get more familiar with the subtleties, you will find the mandarin spoken by the older members can be heavily Cantonese accented and mandarin is likely their second language.

There’s no point in learning mandarin for the family. You’re going to get much more respect by learning Cantonese because it will bring you much closer to them. It’s not simply a case of communicating in either one or the other language. It’s about the feel and emotion closeness of native Cantonese speakers hearing Cantonese. Cantonese is much richer in expression compared to Mandarin. It’s true that I am biased :D

Visit Hong Kong? Speak Cantonese. People who grow up in Hong Kong absolutely do not use mandarin with each other. They speak Cantonese to each other in daily life with English loan words. Mandarin is spoken to those from mainland China who don’t know Cantonese. On the street, Cantonese will be used on mandarin speakers depending on the receivers’ listening skills in Cantonese.

Visit Macau, Guangzhou? Cantonese is fine from my direct experience. Zhuhai is next to Macau, should be the same there. :D

Many mandarin speakers coming to Hong Kong to work actually want to learn Cantonese. They complain they can’t learn Cantonese because either they use English at work or local Hong Kong colleagues will talk to them in mandarin. I have met quite a few mandarin speakers who have said this happens to them and they have limited Cantonese skills despite living in Hong Kong for many years.
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