Back at the Beijing Olympics I rued my inability to speak Mandarin.

You show up at a big event, you’re there for three weeks, you feel as if you ought to be able to throw a few local words at the hometown folks. “Bonsoir, Fifi!” “Guten Abend, Heike!”

But I got to Beijing and Mandarin just defeated me. Cowed me. Beat me down.

And now I’m in Hong Kong, where they speak Cantonese. I’m here for four months. So I ought to be able to throw a rope around the outer limits of this language, right? Hundreds of thousands of people all around me (I mean, ALL around me) speaking Cantonese.

Uh, no. I doubt this is going to happen. Turns out, Mandarin was the “easy” Chinese dialect.

Ack

A co-worker here in Hong Kong told me a story about how he organized a class for newsroom employees … at which Cantonese would be taught.

Expats in general, journalists in particular, feel as if they should know the local lingo. Not to the point of being able to get published in it, but conversational. Perhaps to the point of being able to deal with bureaucrats of the “power company, cable-TV people” sort.

But Cantonese … this is rough.

Here is a link to a wikipedia entry on Cantonese. It tells you the history of the language, and where it is spoken, and how many people (about 70 million) speak it as a first language. Here is a second link, to an item that lays out the aspects of Cantonese that make it particularly difficult on the English-speaking populace.

It’s not just the utter lack of relation to Germanic or Romance languages. It’s not even the Chinese pictograms, rather than a Latin (or even Cyrillic), alphabet-based form or writing. Though those two issues are enough to stop the average Westerner in his tracks.

It’s the “tonal” thing.

In Cantonese, even more than Mandarin, it’s not how you pronounce a word, it’s the tone you use when you say it.

If your voice goes up as you say it, it means X. If your voice falls, it means Y. Can be utterly different. And I’m not sure there is a way to know any of this other than memorization.

But back to the newsroom classroom for well-meaning English-speaking journalists. It started with something like a dozen students, or more than half the editorial employees of the IHT office in Hong Kong. It ended, apparently, with … zero.

Everyone was defeated by Cantonese.

So, it’s not just me.

The lucky thing about this? Because Hong Kong was a British colony for 155 years, almost all the locals speak some English. Some (maybe 25 percent of the ethnic Chinese) speak it quite well. And English is an official language of Hong Kong so most signs are posted in English as well as Chinese.

So you can get along, in English. Even if it is the first language of only a tiny (5 percent, and shrinking) fraction of the population of this teeming island and “administrative region.”

I feel bad about it. I really would like to pick up some Cantonese. But when a very smart guy I know, who has been here pushing three years, feels (rightly) proud that he can order shrimp dumplings in Cantonese … but that is close to the end of his grasp of the language …

I’m scheduled to be here four months. If I can learn how to say the very very basic stuff (like “thank you,” which is an issue in itself, because it can be said about three ways, and the English “thank you” seems to be as popular as anything else) … I’ll be doing more than I anticipate I will be able to do, right this minute.

Again, I’m embarrassed. But if I couldn’t get more than five words in Mandarin, and that is the easy version of Chinese … well, c’est la vie.