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Subtitles available in English and Cantonese. German transcript below.

Ich bin heute auf eine deutsche Seite gestoßen, die versucht, die Beziehung zwischen Kantonesisch und Mandarin, oder dem Begriff Chinesisch, zu erklären. Spoiler Alert: diesen Artikel finde ich total Quatsch. Er behauptet, Kantonesisch sei ein Dialekt von Chinesisch, und Mandarin sei Hochchinesisch.Diese Art Kategorisierung ist ganz politisch motiviert, und von einem rein sprachwissenschaftlichen Standpunkt ist sie sehr problematisch.

In diesem Video werde ich versuchen, als ein Sprachenliebhaber, ein Amateursprachwissenschaftler und ein Sprecher von drei sinitischen bzw. chinesischen Sprachen, zu erklären, was ein Dialekt in diesem Zusammenhang wirklich bedeutet, und abgesehen von der Politik, was Kantonesisch eigentlich ist, und wie man überhaupt diese Sprachen betrachten soll.

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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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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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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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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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Verb aspects are a thing that annoys many learners of Russian, Polish etc. Most learning resources just told me the basics of what they mean, but not how they function in practice.

This is a series where I, as an intermediate Polish learner, attempt to explain some grammatical features common to most Slavic languages in a simple, jargon-free and applicable way. I will be using Polish as my examples but I hope my notes will help learners of other languages too.

The perfective and imperfective verb-pairs took me a long time to figure out, but here’s what they are, in a nutshell:

The perfective aspect of verbs mean one thing: the thing is DONE. FINISHED. ONE ACTION.

The imperfective aspect of verbs can have two meanings:
1. the PROCESS of the action. Starting to do it, but not finishing it yet.
2. doing a thing REPEATEDLY.

Taking Polish as an example: zrobić – to have done; robić – to be in the process of doing OR to do repeatedly, regularly.

Now when to use which is something you need to get a feel for, but I’ll list some general principles I discovered. (I’ll be leaving the formation of the verb forms for another post.)

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It’s been a while since I wrote something about my own language learning hobby, rather than my more educationally minded column. And fairly recently (around a week ago), I made a decision that might sound like a big deal or a dumb idea to many, but a small change in direction to me.

I started ‘dabbling’ in Kazakh.

That doesn’t mean much to my daily life, to be honest. Since I’ve pretty much been feeling on holiday for a year, I’ve long had a ‘main’ language I’m working on, then some others I ‘toy’ with. Before this, I was maintaining a 50-day streak in Hebrew on Duolingo. I also listened to 5 days of Glossika GSR in Lithuanian, just because I’d bought the package during a sale. In short? My other toys are going bye-bye for now.

Why Kazakh?

Before I talk about ‘dabbling’, let me reveal my reasons for trying out this language, and you’ll easily see the fun of dabbling in any language. Beware: all my reasons for learning any language are incredibly specific to myself.

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I can’t believe it’s been eight whole months since I took my TISUS test, switched Swedish from “learn” to “improve” mode and picked up the language I’d been intended to try out for a year – Polish. (In fact, my Polish Glossika package had been lying around in my hard drive for quite a long time.) Fast forward to two months ago, I was attempting to test out my Polish skills for the first time with the surprisingly numerous Polish participants at the Polyglot Gathering. And around a month ago, I stepped foot on Polish soil again, spending entire evenings with friends I made in Berlin. Did it work? Yes and no. I think it’s about time I reflected on what I’ve done so far, how far I’ve gone, what I’ve done right or wrong and how I’ll go forward.

A difficult language

I have a confession to make. Why did I start learning Polish? When people ask me this, I usually bullshit things like Chopin. But the real motivation I had was to take on the “most difficult language of the world”. But what makes a language difficult?

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