BEDA #8: how I communicate with my landlady.

My landlady and her son are moving her stuff from a smaller room to a bigger one outside. I know enough cantonese to understand that "fan" and "gai dan" is rice and eggs! And the other day she asked felicia "bin dou lei", which meant "where do you come from?" But my cantonese/ comprehension of traditional chinese is barely enough to understand the lyrics of this song. Which is super cheesy, and has bad lines. But they have chinese characters underneath, and I can slowly follow along. 

If you guys didn't know, my landlady only speaks cantonese, and very little english. She can't read english either. My flatmate can barely understand her, and I can sometimes understand her, and say a few short phrases. The other day she asked me to translate a note from the neighbours downstairs, but the thing is I was only good with translating letters and numbers in cantonese, and the rest I could say in mandarin. But her understanding of mandarin is minimal. So it was difficult to translate the word "disturbance" , to say the least. Eventually I said "party" in this hongkong accent, which she understood. xD

Cantonese and mandarin are chinese dialects, and in school I learnt mandarin. Although the words are pronounced differently, the way one writes them is mostly similar. However, my landlady reads newspapers written in traditional chinese, but I learnt simplified chinese in school. In traditional chinese, the chinese characters are just more complicated than simplified chinese, and I can't really read or write it. Some of my peers are into taiwanese music, and because in the music videos and online, mostly traditional chinese is used, so they're able to read and write in that form.

Back to communication. When I first moved in, my landlady tried to speak to me in a combination of english and cantonese, but the thing is that I can't understand her english at all. Then once I wrote her a note in chinese, and then she realised that I could understand chinese (I don't know what's her logic) and started speaking to me just in cantonese. Then I could understand her better. 

The reason why my comprehension of cantonese is not so good is because I didn't learn it in school, and wasn't formally taught it by anyone. In singapore, if you're chinese, your knowledge of dialects depends on what you learnt at home or outside of school. If you're not chinese, you learn a little bit of each dialect anyway-- you've got to know when someone's saying "your father's penis" or "vagina" at you, right?

So I'm chinese, and my father is Hakka and my maternal grandfather is Hainanese. What dialect group you're from is supposedly decided by which dialect group your father is in, so I'm supposed to be Hakka, but my dad can't speak it. I live in my maternal grandparent's house in singapore, along with my parents and sister, and my grandparents and my mum speak cantonese to each other, so that's how I learnt it. Every time someone asks me if I can speak cantonese, I reply "sek tang m sek gong" which means I can understand it, but can't speak it. My dad knows a little cantonese, and so do his parents, so that's what they use. That's why I know cantonese, and why I can mostly understand my landlady. The long explanation.

I'll just leave you with this.