happy singles' day!

[amw]

Hello everyone, it's the ancient Chinese festival of Singles' Day. Many years ago, back in the 1990s, a bunch of student bachelors decided to have a party to celebrate/commiserate their singleness. The tradition spread over the next couple decades, and was eventually adopted by local e-commerce companies as an excuse for an epic sale. Nowadays the

Comments

[amw]

From what i understand of Chinatowns, Standard Chinese (aka Mandarin) is not the lingua franca. I guess since so many migrants came from Guangdong province and (later) Hong Kong, Cantonese is still very popular, especially in Canada. A lot of the Chinese words we use in English are actually Cantonese - stuff like kowtow, sampan, wonton, dim sum, bok choy etc.

Something that i had read about but hadn't really sunk home for me until i got here is how different the various "dialects" of Chinese are from one another. I think they are only called dialects for political reasons - in reality they are different languages with a relationship more like Spanish, French, Italian etc. I am wary of jumping too deep into Cantonese (despite living in Guangdong) because i think it might confuse me until i level up in Standard Chinese.

Still, you are right that i need to up my exposure outside of work. Right now almost all my spare time is just spent consuming English-language media - TV shows, books, news and so on. I think a lot of people trying to learn a language go out of their way to consume local language media, so perhaps i should get off my ass and try get into some easier shows.

On the upside, i had a brief meeting with one of my new colleagues yesterday, and she let me know my team is going to be mostly Chinese, which makes me optimistic.

[tsuki_no_bara]

i am such a western white person that i totally forgot that "chinese" encompasses like a thousand different dialects, and the one you're learning isn't necessarily going to be the one spoken by lots of people in any given chinatown. >.<

a friend of mine is teaching herself norwegian, and since she doesn't have actual norwegians to talk to, she watches the news. so, local chinese news! can't hurt, might help.