In preparation for our trip to Hong Kong next week, though many of the people we encounter will speak English, we thought it would be nice to attempt to learn a bit of basic Cantonese.  So far we’ve encountered some features that make it quite a nice language.

• Cantonse is gender neutral.  There is a word for “I”, one for “you” and one that covers “he/she/it”.  That’s a big plus over the gendered-ness of French for example, where everything seems to have a gender.
• There is no tense in Cantonese verbs.  There is just the one word for “be” for example, much simpler than the irregular chaos that is the English “be” (I am, you are, she is, etc).
• There are a regular marker words.  There is a single possessive marker, a plural marker and a question marker, much like Japanese.

However – and this is a biggie – Cantonese is a tonal language. This means that you can have one single word said in multiple ways, each with a different meaning.  I can just about get my head around the idea of high, medium and low pitch.  Where it gets complicated is the rising and falling tones.  Thai has one of each, making a balanced set of five tones.  Cantonese has a second rising tone, bringing it to six!

This means that for each syllable you can keep your pitch steady at one of three different levels; you can drop your pitch; you can raise it, or you can raise it more.  This site explains it well and has a nice English example: try saying “international”.  Sound it out .. “in-ter-na-tion-al” … lots of intonation.  Course, the difference is that if you say it a different way, you aren’t suddenly saying “parrot” or “yes, please I would like some boiled intestines.”