CompuServe Messages

Jan Your Chinese friends are having you on, as the saying goes, especially if they are from southern China. Cantonese, and most other dialects of Chinese, are heavily colloquial in everyday speech, the popularity of new expressions waxing and waning just about as quickly as they do in my teen son's English (we speak Cantonese and Mandarin at home here, as well as English and some other languages, so I guess I can claim some expertise). Last summer my kids had no problem holding a totally unintelligible conversation in front of a guy who had just graduated from learning Cantonese in a US college – the reason it was unintelligible to him was, he had learned the language "by the book," while they were speaking the "living" version of it – a bit like, say, a Swiss studying English at school and then being confronted with a couple of Scots in an Edinburgh pub… Ric.