At home, I speak “Chinglish”, which is the combination of Chinese and English, specifically Cantonese. Cantonese is a dialect spoken in the Southern parts of China such as Guangdong Province and Hong Kong. This language has nine tones compared to Mandarin, which has four tones. Through this class, I took my first formal Cantonese class through iTalki, and it was eye opening. Many native speakers who learned how to speak their mother tongue at home through conversation don’t realize how much detail and grammar rules are involved in their specific language. I told Stephy, my iTalki tutor, that I would like to focus more on medical terminology。 I expected that we would dive deep into terms used in the medical field, but I actually had to start learning the basics.
In Mandarin, we used the pinyin system to get each character’s romanization. In Cantonese, there is a system called jyutping, and that includes the tones, which is a total of nine. Stephy showed me what the tones sound like on a musical note scale, but I couldn’t differentiate sounds right next to each other on the musical note. I could easily differentiate the tones that were further apart. Nevertheless, I never thought about the tones for speaking Cantonese because I hear the sounds and I mimic them. This is the reason, I think, it is much more difficult to learn Cantonese than Mandarin because of the nine tones. During our sessions for this month, I learned how to say body parts, abnormalities in day-to-day conversation and what is professionally appropriate. The other aspect I want to improve on is recognizing traditional characters. Places that speak Cantonese like Hong Kong use the traditional character system rather than the simplified version. Traditional characters are more complex with more strokes. While some characters are more obvious than others , it takes more practice to recognize the ones that are not that similar.
I enjoyed meeting with Leyao for my language partner meetings. It was interesting to hear how she speaks Cantonese because I only speak Cantonese with my immediate family. There is not a large population in Richmond that speaks Cantonese as compared to Manhattan, New York. Therefore, speaking to someone for the first time in Cantonese in Richmond was a new experience for me. It also made me realize that my vocabulary is limited, and I don’t speak as fluently and eloquently as compared to English. Because I want to focus more on medical terminology, Leyao and I watched a Hong Kong TV Drama called “Kids’ Lives Matter”. This way I can expose myself to more medical terminology and take a glimpse of the medical system in other countries. We also discuss these differences between Hong Kong and USA medical systems.
For the month of February, I hope to learn more medical terminology involving specific diseases such as diabetes and recognize more traditional characters. My plan is to take my previous Chinese textbook from other courses and read the traditional character version of the text. I would also like to start learning how to write Chinese characters as I do not know how to write in Chinese. For this goal, I have the character workbook, so I will use that to practice at least three times a week.
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