LEARNING CANTONESE THE LAZY WAY

How did I learn Cantonese? By accident. But it was inevitable. Two factors played a strong part, namely partial deafness, and obsessive curiosity.

The curiosity started acting up first.

In the mid eighties I moved to a residential hotel in North Beach (北岸區 Pak On Keui), on Broadway (布律威街 Bo-loh-wai Kai) near the edge of Chinatown (唐人街 Tong-Yan Kai).
It was a convenient location for work, and I didn’t have time to look for real digs – I was working fifteen hour days, six or seven days a week, in a large company down on Market near the Ferry building. My living quarters were barely fifteen minutes away from the office.
That job came to an end when a project deadline was finally finished and most of the people working in that department had had fits and nervous breakdowns.
My next job was on Grant Avenue (Dupont Street: 都板街) near the Chinatown Gate.

Every day I went down Grant to work, walked back up for lunch, back down, back up. After a few weeks I started recognizing some written characters on signs - when you see several dozen bank names all terminating the same way, it isn't hard to figure out that 銀行 (Ngaan hong: 'silver enterprise') must mean 'bank'.
Same goes for restaurants (飯店 fan diem: 'cooked rice shop'; 餐廳 tsan teng: 'dining hall'; 餐館 tsan koon: 'dining establishment'), herbalists (堂 tong: 'large room or hall for a formal purpose'), political parties and benevolent societies (黨 tong: 'party, association, criminal gang'), companies (公司 gong si: 'public managed'), and numerous other signs.

I bought a dictionary (詞典 or 辭典 tsi diem) to look up what I didn't know.
And eventually another dictionary.
One can never have too many dictionaries.


YENG YUEN 影院 MOVIE THEATRES

The partial deafness I mentioned earlier inspired me to go to a Chinese movie theatre. Because the ambient noise in most theatres makes understanding what actors are saying difficult, I prefer movies with subtitles. Chinese cinema is almost always subtitled for distribution in South-East Asia (東南亞洲 Tung-Naam Ya-Chou).
This I remembered from traveling in the early eighties - perhaps, in C'town, the movies were also subtitled?

They were.
Idiosyncratically.
That, too, provided entertainment value.

"Incant you stink old lumps, match all family toppers!"

While the British ruled Hong Kong, there was a legal requirement that all movies be subtitled in English. The style and standard of English, however, was NOT legally specified.

Please imagine a small group of people involved in the making of the film pulling an all-nighter to get the thing subtitled in time for the release date - a few boxes of pizza (比薩餅 peisa beng, perhaps from 必勝客 Bitsaang Hak: Pizza Hut), some containers of instant noodles (方便麵 fongpien mien: convenience noodle - usually called 公仔麵 Gongtsai mien: Prince Noodles, after a well-known HongKong brand), caffeinated beverages, lots of beer (啤酒 peh-jau) .......

And a dictionary that has seen better days. Well thumbed. But not well written. It was cheap. They misplaced the other one. Somebody spilled sugary milktea on it, several pages are stuck.

At five o'clock in the morning, the one person still working translates the villain threatening the hero that he will wipe out his entire family: fit them with coffin lids.
The context makes clear that a hat shop and voodoo are not implied.
Despite the (entirely logical but wrong) English words on screen.

After that first visit to the now defunct World Theatre, I was hooked.
Five bucks for a double bill (one new movie, one older release, several commercials and coming attractions), a full snack bar at affordable prices with interesting foods - dried plums, candied pork jerky, shrimp snacky things, chrysanthemum tea. Come whenever you like, stay as longs as you want, eat drink smoke and play cards in the back row. Watch teenagers doing ... teenagy things.
NO reek of stale popcorn NOR rancid butter flavour - those aren't things that Cantonese people like.

There were five movie theatres in Chinatown in those days.

[Taai Ming Sing Hey Yuen (great Star Theatre, 大明星戲院), Sai Kai Hey Yuen (World Theatre, 世界戲院), Kam To Hey Yuen (Golden Capitol Theatre, 金都戲院), San Seng Hey Yuen (New Sound Theatre 新聲戲院), and also the Wa Seng (China Sound 華聲戲院) on Jackson Street, which sometimes showed Japanese soft-porn dubbed into Mandarin for homesick Taiwanese.]


Each theatre changed their offerings weekly. Sometimes twice. I had no television.
I ended up seeing about two thousand Cantonese movies.
You kinda pick up on the language when you're that exposed.



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