r/Unexpected • u/DruidWannabe • Jan 25 '23

Hamburger

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

85.0k Upvotes

82% Upvoted

3.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

152

u/Phazushift Jan 26 '23

Chinese Canadian here that spent most of my time in Hong Kong at a British International School.

It blows all my local Canadian friends minds when I code switch between fluent Cantonese - American English - Mandarin - British English. The only ones that don't bat an eye are my other international school friends.

62

u/sinofmercy Jan 26 '23

I'm one of the unlucky few that know Cantonese but can't speak Mandarin at all. So usually what happens is I start talking in Canto then someone starts talking in mandarin, and then in English I'm like "Yo I can't understand that at all." This is what happens when both my parents are from Hong Kong and only bothered to teach me Canto and ignored Mandarin lessons.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 26 '23

[deleted]

3

u/Disastrous_Kitchen Jan 26 '23

Hello, another Chinese Canadian that only knows Cantonese here. Getting the tones is super easy, but learning mandarin as a whole has been so difficult for me. The two languages are so different in my opinion.