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Only my closest, language-loving friends know this, but I’ve been dabbling quite a lot. Since my last project to learn Polish, it’s been sort of a bit of this and a bit of that…Kazakh was a bust (I admitted I was dabbling), and my serious Icelandic project lost steam because our plans for a family trip are ruined by coronavirus.

For the past month, I’ve been actively dabbling in Hebrew. I actually started a while ago, trying out the language on Duolingo, but I gave up because the sentences often had no audio. (Since Hebrew doesn’t write vowels, audio is very important.) Since I finally forked out for Glossika a month or two ago for Icelandic, I thought, why not give Hebrew a try again?

Around a month later, I took my first Hebrew lesson online.

And here I am, making it official. I’m properly studying Hebrew!

I’ll still be working on my other languages — I’m still very much in love with Polish, and I’m having fun learning Taiwanese Hokkien with my friends. But hey, it’s my focus.

But why?

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Hong Kong International Airport

When people and blogs talk about reasons to learn Cantonese, they talk about travelling to Hong Kong, or perhaps Macau and Gwongdung. They talk about the golden age movies and martial arts flicks from Hong Kong, and 90s Cantopop. Oh and there are almost as many native speakers as German.

If you are passionate about these things, you already have very good reasons to learn Cantonese. And you should absolutely go for it! But things have changed over the past decades, and Cantonese-language culture has grown and evolved, especially online.

And I am here to tell you that, whether you already have plans to learn it or have merely entertained the idea once or twice, now—mid 2020—is a better time to learn Cantonese than ever before. Now is the time to take action and make those dreams of understanding a completely new culture come true.

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I’ve been hearing a lot about this new app Drops lately. It sounded a lot like Memrise with a different business model, but my podcaster friends seemed excited about it, so I decided to check it out. After all, its premise is to spend just 5 minutes a day (hence the name), so what’s the harm?

When I first opened up the app, I noticed how beautiful it looks. I don’t judge book by their cover, but I do appreciate the importance of visual design—it helps encourage users to open them.

The basic premise of the app is its laser-sharp focus on vocabulary and nothing else. It divides all the words (which is a LOT) into 13 general categories like “food and drinks” and “travel and vehicles”, which are further broken down into finer topics.

For beginners, you have to start each general category with the first topic under it. Intermediate users have access to more topics right from the get go.

Home screen of Drops

For this review, I’ve been using the app to learn Polish vocabulary. I have a good foundation in the language, so I skipped into the intermediate level (which is an option that thankfully the app has). A few of my comments will be specific to Polish, but I believe the features are identical for other languages. I can safely assume that the vocabulary is the same across languages too: I noticed this from certain duplicate words in Polish, not unlike years ago in Glossika.

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Oops, I might have been too carried away by the project itself, as well as all the crazy travelling I’ve been doing this summer, and skipped the 2 month update! (Seriously, imagine being stranded by two typhoons over one weekend in a city that is served by only one airline. How glorious.) So what happened was I set aside all the studying around the latter half of last month, then went all-in to enjoy the music festival that I mentioned. It was great. I even got my music performed in a foreign country, which I’d never thought about. So feel free to give it a listen before I talk about my experience after the break!

So, how well did my final sprint and self-testing go?

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If you’re a follower of the Cantonese-centric part of my blog, you might have heard about the Cantonese Conversations project elsewhere. It is an initiative that Olly Richards and I, among others, took a while ago to create a set of Cantonese learning materials that are completely organic and natural, in order to fill the gap of listening/reading materials on the intermediate/advanced level. It is a package of video/audio recordings of native conversations, together with a written transcript, Jyutping transcription and my English translation.

It came out officially a few months back, and recently I’ve been working on putting out a revised version, particularly focusing on proofreading the Jyutping. And that got me thinking: if I assume correctly, the majority of users will be reading the Jyutping instead of the Chinese script. And there’s a troubling thing about Cantonese: not only does it lack standardisation, but it is also undergoing a number of pronunciation changes. What that means is if you listen to us native speakers, there will be multiple ways of pronouncing the same words. We hardly even notice the differences, even though they tend to sound drastically different to foreign ears.

In the Jyutping transcriptions inside the package, we aim to

  1. represent the recording as accurately as possible,
  2. expose the reader to different pronunciations, and
  3. limit the number of varieties to make sure readers can still recognise them as the same word.

And quite often, these goals came into conflict, and we had to try and strike a balance. So halfway through the revision process, I thought I’d take to my own blog to explain some of the most common divergent pronunciations, so that it is still possible to recognise the words under different guises. The following pairs of sounds are often called ‘lazy sounds‘ (懶音 laan5 jam1) by native speakers. Chinese teachers will tell you one of them is right and one is wrong, while younger people would say one is newer and one is outdated. The fact is that they’re both in use, so I suggest you use either one yourself, but make sure to get acquainted with both of them. Here we go!

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I can’t believe it’s been one month! The time really zoomed by. For a three-month challenge like this, I find it appropriate to give monthly updates, so here I am. Spoiler warning: the progress isn’t exactly ideal.

The Hurdle

I’m a music student, and this month was a month full of my friends’ graduation concerts, which, for me, entailed rehearsals and concerts every day and evening. I also had to finish a musical composition within the past month. It was really hard, but I’m not going to let this become an excuse to slack off. So as I so happened to have written before, despite my plans for intensive study, I reduced my learning activities, but made sure they were consistent. It’s more important to do something every single day than do a lot on one day.

So here’s a quick run-through of my project progress!

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Collage of scenes from Pavia. Photo from Wikipedia

Aaaaand so, I’m back. From the craziness of university. But more craziness is coming on.

I never liked these ‘three months’ challenges, especially how overused this particular length is. But it just happens so that I’m going to Italy, for the second time in my life, in (a bit less than) three months.

The Italian language was always on my radar: after all, it’s the one language that’s most closely associated with music. I read Italian words on a daily basis in my musical scores – which is why I often joke that I have a wide (if highly specialised) vocabulary base for someone who doesn’t speak the language at all.

And around a month ago, I was notified that I was accepted at an international festival for composers near Milan, and immediately decided this was an unmissable opportunity for the polyglot side of me as well. After all, I’ll be there for two weeks, unlike my last trip, which was shorter and more touristic. So off I go!

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At the time of writing, it’s the Chinese Lantern Festival, i.e. the 15th day of the first lunar month, also known as the Chinese Valentine’s Day. And a mere 3 days after that, it’s a day that many Hongkongers either relish or fret about: the western Valentine’s Day! Among local teenagers, being single is a thing often poked fun at, to say the least. So, to celebrate my 21st single Valentine’s in a row, here’s a rapid-fire list of local/Internet Cantonese slang related to love and relationships – so you can save your 我愛你 ngo5 oi3 nei5 (I love you) for your significant other and joke light-heartedly about him/her with your friends afterwards 😉

Single life

superdry brand logo

Superdry – single life in a nutshell.

Sometimes I look back on single life, which felt so dry (thirsty for romance). Whenever people with 愛情嘅滋潤 oi3 cing4 ge3 zi1 jeon6 (the “moistening” of romance) took to the Internet to 曬命 saai3 meng6 (to “sun-dry” life) i.e. brag, or poke fun at me, all I could respond with was 首先…… sau2 sin (first…), which is a shorthand for 首先，你要有個女朋友 sau2 sin1, nei5 jiu3 jau5 go3 neoi5 pang4 jau5 (…but before that, you must have a girlfriend), a self-deprecating joke that’s gotten so overused on the Internet that the first part alone is understood to imply the entire sentence.

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“What’s my name in Chinese?”

I cringe a little whenever I hear this question, because it comes up so often. To Westerners, Chinese is probably the epitome of an exotic language: it sounds sing-songy and weird and looks completely incomprehensible. But all I could answer to this question is, “what’s your name in Russian then?” That would probably just be the original name with an accent, which is basically the case in Chinese. Still, we see that many Westerners do end up getting a Chinese name (漢名 hon3 meng2 Han name) that sounds almost completely different. How do they do it?

Transliteration and Translation

There are several important concepts and factors relating to how Westerners have their Chinese names. Firstly, we transliterate, not translate. Translation of a name, in a daily sense as I would put it, involves more of a transfer of meaning (意譯 ji3 jik6 meaning translation), like how we say ‘Jacob means Supplanter in Hebrew’. But we never call Jacob ‘Supplanter’; Jacob is just Jacob, or rather, יַעֲקֹב with an anglicised pronunciation. A more common example comes from European first names based on saints: ‘Katarzyna’ would be a translation of ‘Catherine’, since strictly speaking, they are names native to different cultures with the same meaning (in this case, reference to the original Catherine).

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Working along the Swedish countryside

Again, it’s been a while since I last posted! As you might guess, it’s truly been a crazy term for me at university. For starters, I wrote and rehearsed two musical compositions. And as the term progressed, it’s only gotten worse: at the time of writing (this sentence) it is the end of term, where piles of work come to a climax. Ironically, slowly through the months, I’ve cooked up this post about running out of time – for everything in general, but particularly for language learning.

In my last post, I suggested ways for me and you to juxtapose time for learning two languages at the same time. Unfortunately, when the free time you have isn’t much to begin with, splitting it up just leaves you with hardly anything left. In other words, I’ve put Kazakh aside. Despite this, my German has been improving by leaps and bounds, as well as my Polish, without needing hours and hours of intensive study. How did I squeeze the time to manage that?

It’s all about choosing the less intensive but consistent activities to keep, making use of ‘dead time’ (that goes to waste anyway) and putting the time-consuming ones on hold.

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