So besides Cantonese and English, what have you learned/what do you speak, Tess?


I can't either. But I wouldn't mind learning - Mandarin is really beautiful.

Yay!

Mostly in school, I have learnt Japanese, Arabic and Malay, Sarah, but I rather fancy learning Italian because I love to learn to sing some day! Italian songs. Um, Mandarin, because I can already sing in the language. Not speak. Used to belong to various choirs including a travelling one that got invited to nice places to sing. One of these choirs was a Mandarin one where I was technically the "non-native" speaker who had to learn all the words and meanings by hard so I can sing meaningfully! Boy, it was fun! Such wonderful memories...

As a uni student, I used to fly Aeroflot every time (as it's cheap!) and the writing on the plane and in Moscow was cool! I was tempted to learn Russian then but never got round to it with all these weird kids (mine) hanging round me - Excuses, excuses, excuses. In this, VN will go first but as for Mandarin, I'm one step ahead of the game with my singing and moreover she knows not a single word in Mandarin other than the names of numbers.

Let's do it!

ok, ni jou sum more min zi ??
or Cantonese: Lay gui mai mainn arh??

OK then. If someone can come up with a way of teaching me that won't make my brain explode. It's SO long since I tried to start to a learn a language, never mind without a teacher

[quote name='Ifsy' post='338350' date='Jun 8 2006, 03:42 PM']
I can help with your Chinese if you want:)

[/quote]

wooooo wicked! What can you teach me?
[/quote]
What do you wanna learn?

Something useful! I can say hi, bye, how are you, thank you, please, toast, hang on a second, good night and good morning, but they're all in caontonese, and I need to learn manadarin! How would you say that in Mandarin? I know hello is Ni hao or something ( I can't get the tone noises on my pc) and Ni hao ma is How are you? isn;t it?

Took me ages to work that one out.

Bye - zài jiàn (sorry, cant help with accents)

good night - wăn ān

good morning - zăo chén hăo

toast, I'm guessing is just - kăo miàn bāo (which is what we say at home anyway)

hang on a sec - dĕng yí xià



damn...pc keeps mucking up accents!

toast (as in cheers?)..it's kan bei
i think cppf got the rest for ya...
sorry....i am unable to post the pronunciation here..

Thanks Any idea in how I can say them?

When I said Toast, I meant as in grilled bread! That was the only conversation me and my friend had completely in chinese! wooo! I said "morning, how are you?", and she said "I'm fine thank you, would you like some toast?", and I said "no, hang on a second!". She had to brandish the toast at me though, coz I didn;t get that bit at the time!

Tess, you do know quite a lot of different languages!



For toast, cppf is right in saying kao mian bau. But nowadays, we say tu shi in Mandarin, a phonetic saying from pronunciation of toast in English, or dor si in Cantonese.

Amie

Sorry....the pronounciation might not be very correct....
but that's suppose to be Cantonese.

I think it would have been easier if it was written as: 'lay gui mai men ah?'

my version: nei giu meh meng ar?

The pinyin should have been : ni3 niao4 she1 me4 ming2 zi4? The numbers signify the tones. I am willing to help you with pinyin if you want. We learn both Mandarin and English in school. I speak reasonably ok but my writing needs work. *grin* I am however, quite good in hanyu pinyin because I rely on them ALOT so yea...practice makes perfect.

My family's Cantonese but strangely enough, I can't speak it well. I find it difficult to string sentences together. And there are words in Mandarin which you cannot translate to Cantonese. House is one I can think of. In Mandarin, it's jia1. In Cantonese, it's ook kay. Haa... PM me if you need help yea.

I've never learnt any piu yin in cantonese, I doubt there are piu yin in cantonese though...