Anto Chan: Why Cantonese is so hard to learn

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      Chinese New Year is fast approaching—it's on Sunday (February 10).

      If you're the kind of person who mixes up exclamations of "Gung hay fat choy" with "Chow Yun-Fat", maybe it's time to brush up on your Chinese as we head into the Year of the Snake.

      Just in time, here's a little lesson in Cantonese by Ontario-based comedian Anto Chan.

      As he points out, due to the different tones used in Chinese languages, one word can have many different meanings. (A Chinese Canadian friend with the last name Ma told me that word means a multitude of disparate things, depending upon pronunciation. And apparently, I never got her name right.) 

      So in other words, by the end of this video, you should be fluent in Cantonese.

      Or maybe not.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Sandal Sam

      Feb 5, 2013 at 4:00pm

      He used different words, not one word with different intonations. BTW Mandarin is a dialect spoken in the Beijing area and greatly influenced by the Mongolian and Manchu dialects.