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The author never really learned Cantonese, her only "teachers" were parents and other immediate contacts. No school, no media, no books, articles, current event
by aeyes 5y ago
The author never really learned Cantonese, her only "teachers" were parents and other immediate contacts. No school, no media, no books, articles, current events. After starting school there was less time and need to speak Cantonese so it is clear that her vocabulary and ability will be extremely limited. Its not forgetting, in this case it was never really learned like a first language.
- labster 5y agoSo people who can’t read don’t have a first language? Education is not a prerequisite for speaking a language. For thousands of years people learned from speaking with family, even in remote communities or distant farmhouses.
- ilammy 5y agoHow did that conclusion, from “no books” only? The point is not literacy per se or something. It's more about how much you use a language in your daily life. If it's only limited to talking to just your parents on occasional basis then you miss out on a lot of language skill development. If you use Cantonese for 1 hour in a given week total and the remaining 110 hours of your waking time are filled with English, it's not much of a surprise what language ability gets developed more. Cantonese is still your first language – you learned it first, in limited capacity – but it can cease being your primary language.
- nindalf 5y agoI have many friends who grew up in India who never learned how to read their mother tongue. They can’t read media, books, articles, current events as you say but they can communicate with all other Tamil speakers. They might not be able to write words in the Tamil script, but they get by writing the words in English. “ivan laam adikaraan”, a friend complained yesterday about a sports event. This is pretty common among my friend groups. What I’m saying is, our understanding and knowledge of language is complex. It’s possible to speak a language without reading it. It’s possible to read a language without speaking it. It’s not as simple as you make it out to be.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hnfong 5y agoWithout being fully immersed in a Cantonese environment (which, depending on your definition, basically only includes Hong Kong and some parts of the Guangzhou area), it's almost impossible to really "learn" Cantonese outside such environments, since there's actually very few resources for intermediate/advanced learners of Cantonese... There isn't a proper Cantonese dictionary (yet). The existing ones either assume you are already familiar with Mandarin Chinese, or are just simple translations to English. There (almost) aren't any children's books in Cantonese. There is very few literature, and serious books written in Cantonese. The reason being Cantonese being traditionally considered a 'slangy spoken dialect of Chinese' not fit for writing serious work. We're trying to fix that, but it will take some time.