As Asian cities go, Hong Kong is pretty "western-friendly" - by which I mean it's relatively easy for westerners to fit in, mostly because there's a lot of English written and spoken here. That's obviously a legacy of the British involvement in Hong Kong over the last century or so and it is changing - slowly, Cantonese (the local language) and Mandarin (the "official" Chinese language) are reasserting themselves. It's very unlikely that English will disappear at any point in the foreseeable future, given HK's profile in the business world and the use of English in business but if you want to fit in and get around a bit more easily, it's good to know a little bit of Chinese.
S is teaching me a whole variety of useful Canto phrases, and so I've been learning to speak and read Mandarin, with the help of an excellent website called Memrise, which I highly recommend. Mandarin is tricky because it's not based on an alphabet like a lot of western languages. Not only do you have to learn the sounds of words (and the correct tones) you also have to learn to recognise the symbols and also their pinyin spellings, which is the way that the sounds of the symbols are translated into a western alphabet. It sounds complicated, and it is, but what this means is that for the first time in nearly 45 years, I'm learning to read all over again.
I think S is getting a bit tired of me stopping in the middle of the street, pointing to signs, and excitedly pointing to the one symbol I recognise, but it's great fun for me. I'm also realising that learning to speak Mandarin is not just a case of translating from one language to another. For instance 小 means small and 心 means heart. Easy, right? Put them together, however, and you find that 小心 means caution! Obviously. I think this explains some of the bizarre "Chinglish" tee shirts that I've been seeing!
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