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

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

Postby sfuqua » Mon Aug 01, 2022 4:42 pm

My son married his long time girlfriend over the weekend. It was quite a show, a massive photoshoot and feast with a little wedding ceremony in the middle. Great fun. Anyway, I finally got to meet E
s family and see them in action together. E, my new daughter, is a very American kid from California. I have heard that she speaks Chinese, but I never heard her speak it. I know that her family is Chinese of course, and still has strong family ties to China, but I sort of assumed that the connection wasn't that big. :)
For the wedding weekend, i suddenly found myself in a huge sea of smiling Cantonese and a little Mandarin (I think). Everyone was very nice, and every effort was made to make my wife and me feel at ease, but everything was very Chinese. I was a little lost. :o
Grandpa and Grandma speak no English. Dad and Mom have some trouble with English. Aunts and Uncles are all over the place in English levels. I realize that I can depend on the respect and support of this nice, three generation San Francisco Chinese family to get me through family social things, but it seems a little unfair to have them do all the language work. I also know that knowing the language, even imperfectly, can deepen the level of understanding. :D

I want to show respect to my new daughter-in-law and her family. I want to learn Chinese. :D

I do not have unrealistic expectations. I know Chinese is a beast of a language. I know that my hair is grey. This morning I got up and immediately bought the old Assimil vol 1 and vol 2 Mandarin course. I have always loved Assimil for European languages; although I know that there are mixed opinions on this one, although I bet it won't hurt. I also bought Remember the Hanzi, since I remember friends enjoying Remember the Kanji in the old days. Maybe learning to read might be more straightforward than learning to speak. I don't know... :lol:

I really need to get a tutor to get anywhere with a tonal language like Chinese. :D

Uh, what do I do next? Get a Pimsleur course? Sign up for some magic online course that will teach me Chinese in a week? :lol:

And what does all this learning Mandarin have to do with connecting with a family that speaks Cantonese? Does it make more sense to learn traditional or simplified characters? :shock:

Help! What do I do? :o

All suggestions welcome. :D
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby rdearman » Mon Aug 01, 2022 4:47 pm

I would find out from the daughter in law if the majority speak Cantonese or Mandarin and plan appropriately. They call them dialects but honestly I think they are two different languages.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby RyanSmallwood » Mon Aug 01, 2022 5:50 pm

I guess it depends exactly what your goals are, if you think Cantonese is what you'll be mostly hearing it might make more sense to get some survival level Cantonese to follow along rather than going the roundabout way of studying Mandarin. If this is partly just an excuse to try learning Chinese for its own sake in addition to trying to communicate better for your new family, I'd say that Mandarin has a lot of fun resources that can make studying Chinese as a beginner enjoyable, and it will help in the long run with learning Cantonese, but probably you should also study Cantonese if you plan on learning Cantonese.

For practical Cantonese in the short term, if I remember right there was a Pimsleur Cantonese, I'm not sure if they've added levels to it recently, but if you can get access to it that's probably the simplest way to get good conversational skills. Sydney Lau Cantonese is probably the best structured textbook series, there's no official audio for it as far as I know, but someone paid some native speakers to create unofficial recordings of the dialogs, if you use it I can try to help you find them or upload my files somewhere. The FSI Cantonese course doesn't teach characters, but it has lots of detailed drills for learning tones, and is probably a good way to boost audio comprehension. As I've mentioned elsewhere around here, I like running them through audacity to use the pauses so I can use them as Assimil-like input courses with the extra examples of sentence patterns from the drills serving to really internalize the structure of the language. If you use Anki I think someone uploaded a bunch of Cantonese sentences with high quality machine audio, which isn't perfect, but is another way to boost Cantonese comprehension.

If you decide you want to study Mandarin as well, I found the Anki deck "Chinese Spoonfed" really useful for developing listening or reading or both. There's probably other good coursebooks to use, but I'm less familiar with them personally. If you get a decent foundation with Mandarin you can start the Journey to the West reader series by Imagine8 press which begins at a vocabulary at 600 and goes to 3000. It probably won't help with communicating with relatives, but its a fun way to learn Mandarin on your own, and in the long term can open up other more interesting materials for improving.

That's an overview of the stuff I'd suggest, if you need help finding anything I'm more than happy to help.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby sfuqua » Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:18 pm

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

I would love to make Cantonese/Mandarin my focus for a few years. This might save me from the steady wanderlust I have experienced lately. I found a few anki decks that seem to teach characters, including one that teaches Cantonese characters. I have no idea if these are useful at all. :D

It seems to me that my first goal should be to learn to speak Cantonese. Then I can do more. It looks like learning to read would involve learning Mandarin too. :shock:

Or maybe I'm confused. :o

I'm going to look for Pimsleur and I am going to download FSI Cantonese and try these first. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. :D
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荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby Axon » Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:22 pm

Congratulations to your son and new daughter-in-law!

When I got married, my parents diligently worked through Pimsleur Mandarin. They've forgotten most of it for now due to having no need to use it, but in a few years they'd like to travel to China and are ready to try to build that foundation again. If you rarely see your daughter-in-law's extended family, you're probably going to be in a similar boat unless you develop an intrinsic interest in Chinese culture - very possible for such a worldly person as yourself!

rdearman is right that you'll need to figure out whether Cantonese or Mandarin is best for the interactions you expect to have. Fortunately it's never been easier to learn Cantonese in terms of availability of resources. The two varieties are not mutually intelligible at all, but I've met even elderly Cantonese speakers in San Francisco who understand Mandarin perfectly and can speak it at varying levels of proficiency. You'll have to figure out from your son whether that's a viable strategy for the communication you want to achieve with the extended family.

For someone with a language background like yourself, I'm really not sure which would be easier to learn. Cantonese pronunciation should be a little easier. Pitch is a feature of natural speech in any language, so as long as you carefully study the tones and don't ignore them, they'll come with time. I've done a lot of research on tone in Chinese languages and how people learn them, so if you want an information barrage, send me a PM.

One problem with the Mandarin vs Cantonese question is that, if you go with Mandarin, the extended family will expect you to speak in more-or-less standard Mandarin and will naturally respond in kind. After all, Mandarin for native Cantonese speakers is just a more easily accessible lingua franca than English is, and they'll probably have been used to hearing various accents in Mandarin over the years from movies, TV, other Chinese speakers, etc. You'll be able to use Google Translate and dictionary apps pretty easily. Of course, if the extended family isn't that familiar with Mandarin, that's a dead end.

With Cantonese, you lose access to Google Translate, but you also lose access to one "standard" that you can refer to. The Cantonese spoken by cool young adults in Hong Kong in 2022 is different from the Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou in 1990, which is different from that of San Francisco's Chinatown in 1960. People who grew up in Cantonese-speaking diaspora communities in the US sometimes write about traveling to Hong Kong and realizing they talk like old people. All that to say, you may have the most luck making FSI Cantonese the core of your studies as the age and background of the speakers in the recordings is likely closest to that of your extended family with the lowest English ability.

You should learn traditional characters. They're much more common in the more established California Chinese communities as well as in Hong Kong. You have basically no reason to learn simplified characters from what you've described, and you can pick up the most common simplifications quickly if need be.

I know you like Anki, and so I recommend this FSI Cantonese deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/763798048
If you go with Mandarin, the only deck you need is called Spoon Fed Chinese.

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

Edited to add:

I do recommend learning to read, eventually. The etymological links between characters become much more clear and provide many much-needed memory anchors when you learn how characters work. I recommend the Outlier Linguistics add-on for Pleco, Pleco being an indispensable Chinese dictionary app with excellent Cantonese support. You'll also notice a lot of fun Chinese stuff hidden in plain sight around you in the Bay Area. To give just one example, lots of Chinese restaurants explain in their Chinese names what kind of food they serve, while the English name gives no hint at all.

I've never found any astoundingly good resources in Mandarin for learning Cantonese - you're not going to unlock any treasure trove of secret knowledge. Almost everything written in Chinese apart from casual conversations and some advertisements is in "Mandarin" (actually Standard Written Chinese, which is more or less formal Mandarin but without some dialectal features common in different Mandarin-speaking areas). Older people tend to be more comfortable writing in a more formal Standard Written Chinese that's further from colloquial Mandarin. Also, basically all TV in Cantonese has subtitles in Standard Written Chinese. This has taken me years to get used to. More and more content on YouTube is being created with Cantonese subtitles, though, which is really helpful for learning.
Last edited by Axon on Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby DaveAgain » Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:39 pm

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

Once you've got the hang that you could eat milk chocolate covered raisins, with chopsticks, while watching 101 different adaptations of The Water Margin. It would be fab! :-)
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby RyanSmallwood » Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:45 pm

sfuqua wrote:I would love to make Cantonese/Mandarin my focus for a few years. This might save me from the steady wanderlust I have experienced lately. I found a few anki decks that seem to teach characters, including one that teaches Cantonese characters. I have no idea if these are useful at all. :D


Cantonese characters can be somewhat helpful for seeing spoken Cantonese written down, although they're somewhat limited in that they're not used too often outside certain instances. Most movie subtitles and books are going to be in Standard Written Chinese, but there are some exceptions so one strategy later on is to hunt down certain movies or books that use Written Cantonese. You can also find wikipedia articles in Cantonese and certain websites as well. You can read more about it here if you're interested.

Probably they won't be strictly necessary as a beginner as most resources will use some kind of romanization as well, but it also doesn't hurt to learn them because there's not too many additional ones to learn from Standard Written Chinese and it might be useful down the road. Sometimes its nice just to have a character to associate with each word you learn as well.

Another free online resource you might want to look at is the youtube channel 冚唪唥粵文讀本 Hambaanglaang Cantonese Graded Readers, the videos I looked at read the audio slower than I'd prefer, but there's still a bunch of content here and its probably a helpful source for improving vocabulary. CantoDict is probably another website that will be helpful to know about if you need to look any Cantonese words up.
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Re: Help! I have a real Chinese daughter-in-law!

Postby sfuqua » Mon Aug 01, 2022 11:08 pm

I'm going to start today, and the only resources I have already are for Mandarin, so it will be Mandarin for a day at least...
I have the audio of Assimil Le Cantonais, but I am having a hard time finding a copy of the book, either a hard copy or a scan. It is strange that Assimil still sells the audio to a book that they don't have in stock. :o
I think I have found the Pimsleur Cantonese course at a reasonable price, and I have a Michel Thomas Chinese (Mandarin I assume) on my hard drive that I got years ago, cheap at the bookstore. :D

But ultimately I want to learn Cantonese. It has always intrigued me. Some time touring around Hong Kong with a Chinese Mandarin speaker, a few decades ago, showed how different Cantonese is from Mandarin. The woman I was with had to resort to passing written notes to people from time to time, which I found to be very cool. I bet there is a lot more Mandarin on the street now in Hong Kong, but I bet the "insider language" in my new daughter's family is Cantonese. :D

I've been looking for a "retirement language" to devote myself to for the next few years, and I keep changing my mine which one. Any language, including English, is worth a lifetime of study, but Chinese is such a beast of a language, that it might make a great challenge to get anywhere... :shock:

I want to at least be known as the father-in-law who really tried. :lol:
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荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
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Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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

Postby sfuqua » Mon Aug 01, 2022 11:14 pm

Oh, the chopstick's thing... I'm pretty good with chopsticks and would even call myself an expert, however... There were some really challenging foods at the wedding, and I barely kept my tuxedo presentable. After the first meal, everybody could tell what I had been eating, so I was glad for a change to more formal attire for later in the proceedings. :D
I have to admit that I did better with the beer and wine. :lol:
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荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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

Postby DaveAgain » Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:16 pm

sfuqua wrote:But ultimately I want to learn Cantonese. It has always intrigued me. Some time touring around Hong Kong with a Chinese Mandarin speaker, a few decades ago, showed how different Cantonese is from Mandarin. The woman I was with had to resort to passing written notes to people from time to time, which I found to be very cool. I bet there is a lot more Mandarin on the street now in Hong Kong, but I bet the "insider language" in my new daughter's family is Cantonese. :D
Steve Kaufmann has a how I learnt Cantonese video that you might find interesting.
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