What's up?

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 04:32:10 +0000

One standard greeting (similar to “what’s up”) is

dim2 aa3

Which is super informal, and can have responses such as the following:

mou5 je5 (nothing)
gae hou aa3 (quite well)
m4 hou gong2 la (not going to speak (about it))

Lastly, if you want to be a little more serious (I actually want to know how you are), but still quite informal, you can just add nei5 (you) in front.

daai6 gaa1 hou2 (Hello, world!)

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 20:50:18 +0000

Nighttime picture of Hong Kong

I’ve been learning Cantonese off & on for the past few years. It’s been mostly “off” during the pandemic, but one of my goals this year is to become conversational in the language.

To follow along, there’s a few things we need to cover first. First, what is Cantonese? It’s a language, spoken in parts of China. When people say “Chinese” they usually mean Mandarin as a spoken language. Check out Wikipedia for a description of the many languages spoken in China. Another analogy might be that Hindi is the “official” language of India, but there are many languages, and large parts of the country where Hindi is not the primary language spoken (if at all).

Cantonese on sugar, spice, &terminal? nice

What's up?

dim2 aa3

daai6 gaa1 hou2 (Hello, world!)