Thursday 12 February 2009

Nei hou

Ross and I went to our first Cantonese lesson last night (after several false starts courtesy of the YWCA) so now I can say good morning, hello, my name is Sarah, and I am British. The good news is that the way to say UK (ying gwok) is very positive - ying has heroic overtones, while gwok means country. When you use the correct tones of course. America, (mei gwok) means beautiful country, and Australia (ou jau) means round-ish continent. New Zealand is a complex, almost transliterated one, which I won't even attempt to replicate.

I think (hope) we'll get the hang of the tones over time, they sort of make sense until you start trying to say something!

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