Chinese Lesson 1: Know The Bloody Difference

In keeping with my multilingual experiment to raise Ju trilingual, I have decided to do a series on learning Chinese. This first post is something of a prologue of sorts, just to set things straight. In my research on multilingualism, I've chanced across a few personal blogs by Westerners (mostly American) who have either (1) studied the language and/or (2) married a Chinese person and are bringing up their baby in Mandarin as well as English or (3) adopted a Chinese baby and are bringing up their baby in Mandarin as well as English.

They are not all that bad, and some are in actually entertaining and quite insightful.  However, some of them have made the following mistake that I deem it worthwhile to devote my first post on Chinese language to this irritating error: they do not know the difference between MANDARIN (Pu Tong Hua) and CANTONESE (one of the many dialects of Southern China).

This is the Chinese character, "learn", pronounced "xue" in pinyin.  "Xue" is what we call MANDARIN or Pu Tong Hua. Some Westerners call it "Mandarin Chinese" but even if you say "I speak Chinese", most Mandarin speakers understand that you speak Mandarin.   Mandarin is the official spoken language of China and Taiwan. 

Now, Westerners who have learned to speak CANTONESE, which is a dialect of Chinese, would pronounce the word as "hock".  They are not speaking Chinese. Cantonese is th de facto tongue of Hong Kongers and spoken in the province of Guangdong (previously known as "Canton", therein the origin of the name).  In Mandarin, the Cantonese dialect is known as "Guangdong hua" or "the language of Guangdong.

So today's very basic yet important lesson is to know the bloody difference between Mandarin Chinese -- Pu Tong Hua -- and Cantonese. Of course if you want to nitpick, you could say every dialect including Pu Tong Hua counts as "Chinese". I would disagree as a native Chinese speaker*.  That's because Mandarin is the unifying language of China, created  its written script was first standardised by China's First Emperor of Qin (aka Qin Shi Huang) to unify the vast lands hitherto known as Zhong Guo (the Middle Kingdom, aka China). Cantonese, on the other hand, is only spoken by a small percentage of the 1 billion inhabitants of China. They of course include the large population of overseas Chinese migrants which would explain why Americans and Canadians think they are speaking "Chinese" when they are really speaking a popular southern dialect.

Hence, from here on, I will use "Mandarin" to refer to the spoken language Pu Tong Hua; "Chinese" to refer to the entire language system which includes verbal Mandarin and the written Chinese characters. With this,I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I think I will in bringing up my baby trilingually.

*I consider a native Chinese speaker as a person whose heritage and lineage derives from China and who has learnt Chinese at a level that it constitutes a central part of his/her identity and perspective in addition to proficiency in the language. I have studied and spoken Chinese since birth, simultaneously with English and Cantonese. My mother's parents hailed from Guangdong province and they spoke only Cantonese to me when they were alive. To this day, even though my proficiency in Cantonese is below-average, I maintain a vocabulary and fluency that gets me by pretty decently on the streets of Hong Kong.