Amazing or Irritating?

Mandarin (aka Chinese) being one of the offical languages of UN, the mother tongue of approximately 20% of the world's population, is historic, unique, artistic to me. As a native Mandarin speaker like many out there, it is easy and uncomplicated to speak correctly, grammar and style is another matter.

Being borned to a Cantonese family, I am proud to be able to speak it without difficulty, though I knew that my Cantonese wasn't all the wonderful, especially after hearing my uncle who resides in Hong Kong speaking the dialect. According to Wikipedia, around 5% of native Mandarin speakers speak Cantonese.

Most languages comprises of 4 practices - speaking, writing, reading, hearing. Grammar and vocabs are elements that give languages lives and tastes. The Mandarin vocabs alone are extremely enormous, today I learned that it is so goes to Cantonese. Properly decoded but I'm blind to >70% of the words from the Cantonese pronunciation site, I feel bloody shallow.

Beautiful yet complicated as it is, no wonder non-Chinese speakers give up learning Chinese. And no wonder so many people can't speak Cantonese properly. Heck, even I can't pronounce many of them!

Knowledge of the day: The six UN Offical Languages are English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Spanish, with English and French being the two most widely used.

Cuckoos

watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975). remember mom said it was nice when i was in secondary school. A little too draggy (but then which old film wasn't?) but gosh, I must say the actors were damn good - thumbs up to names like Jack Nicholson and Danny De Vito!

read the book, or at least read the review online. Enjoy :)