For the next four months, I’m going to be kicking Cantonese’s ass in preparation for an telephone interview next February. For this interview I need to meet or exceed the Interagency Language Roundtable’s S2 – Limited Working Proficiency requirements, which are described as:
- able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements
- can handle with confidence, but not with facility, most social situations including introductions and casual conversations about current events, as well as work, family, and autobiographical information
- can handle limited work requirements, needing help in handling any complications or difficulties; can get the gist of most conversations on non-technical subjects (i.e. topics which require no specialized knowledge), and has a speaking vocabulary sufficient to respond simply with some circumlocutions
- has an accent which, though often quite faulty, is intelligible
- can usually handle elementary constructions quite accurately but does not have thorough or confident control of the grammar.
I took a similar test for Mandarin about 18 months ago and killed it. I’m estimating I need about 40% of my current Mandarin proficiency in Cantonese to be able to pass the interview with some room to spare. Mandarin has been a project over the last six years while living in China and having access to a large number of sympathetic native speakers, though, and I have only have four months to prepare for this interview.
Easy peasy.
Despite only knowing about 50 words of Cantonese, I have two major advantages over the average Western beginning Cantonese learner.
- I already speak Mandarin. Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible, but they are also very closely related. A huge amount of vocabulary and general language sense will carry over from one to the other, like an English speaker that has learned Spanish to a decent level of fluency taking on Italian or Portuguese.
- I know a LOT more about how I learn than I did when I started Mandarin. A lot of the last six years has been spent in trial and error, and I’ll be able to apply all of those lessons learned in the beginning with Cantonese.
That’s not to say this is going to be easy, just that I’m pretty confident that it’s going to be possible.
I’ll be posting a lot more about my trials and tribulations with Cantonese in the near future. For now, 係咁先喇, 拜拜!
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wordpress ate my comment. or maybe it was the gfw-supplied lag.
it sounds like they’re setting the bar kinda low with phrases like “though often quite faulty”, though i get this is more likely just a funky phrasing by a non-native speaker.
knowing how you learn is a huge advantage. though admittedly i have some of the worst motivation to actually study of anyone i know, my chinese is halfway decent in large part to knowing how to go about the process, it being the 9th or so language i’ve studied in some form or another. not that i can speak all 9, but the process is what’s more important in my opinion.
I get the feeling that S2 isn’t much more advanced than lazy expat bar Chinese — want, need, like, from, to, live at, and some nouns and adjectives. Here’s hoping — I’d like to be ludicrously over-prepared rather than the other way around.
Do you need Cantonese for a new job or an actual interview? Also, you have a huge advantage that you already know a sh*tload of characters, although I’m afraid you only know simplified (?).
Keep us updated, I’m really curious how it works out. I think Cantonese had the same grammar as Mandarin, but that words are different?
It’s for part of a long, painful government job application process. The US federal government loves those.
I can’t write traditional for shit, but I can read just fine (there are some traditional characters that trip me up, but I can almost always figure them out from context). There are a *lot* of characters used to write spoken Cantonese that just aren’t used in Mandarin — i.e., 嚟 — but it can’t be more than a couple hundred, and most of them are characters I already know with some extra radical added.
There are pretty significant differences between Mandarin and Cantonese both in grammar and vocabulary. A lot of the general concepts are the same, but overall they’re far enough apart to make them totally mutually unintelligible.
Cantonese is my native language.
Remember, Cantonese is mostly a spoken language. I would not worry too much about the written forms of the Cantonese characters. Most Cantonese speakers cannot write them anyway.
Pick a pronunciation system and master it. I use Jyutping which is the most popular in the Cantonese learner’s forum.
Under the old classification system, Cantonese has 9 tones. But in fact it only has 6.
Edwin,
Thanks so much for the comment!
The whole “Cantonese is mostly a spoken language” thing is tough for me — I’m such a visual learner it hurts — but I’m giving it a shot. Can most Cantonese speakers read those characters, though, even if they can’t write them?
I’ve mostly gotten Jyutping down — there are just a couple of vowel clusters I mess up, mostly because of cross-pollution with Mandarin. I’m working on it, but it’ll take a little while.
The “spoken language” concept is actually not that scary. It just means that you should focus on listening.
Another tip: don’t worry too much about your tones. Cantonese natives don’t mind foreigners messing up their tones. We somehow find this kind of accent amusing. Even Cecilie messed up her tones very often, but there is no problem understanding her.
A warning: be prepared to get English responses back most of the time. As you can see from Cecilie’s video (Mark’s links below). Cantonese speakers are not used to speak their language with foreigners.
Cantonese? It’s useless, la. It’s too hard for foreigner. Just learn Mandarin!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFaCDyPPk7s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18YX8zAbmeU
Oh, best of luck. I’m a Chinese-American who speaks Cantonese in the home, but I understand a lot more than I speak–in both Mandarin and Cantonese.
It seems as though I’ve forgotten a tone or two out of the seven or so, although I can recognize when someone else is speaking in the wrong tone, I can’t seem to speak the correct one. Which leads me to actually speak more Mandarin on tone than Cantonese.
Good luck. In a few months (January?), will you post a video of some speech in Cantonese for us viewers of your blog to listen to if you have the time? (: Please?