香港: 2008 Archives
If you're in the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Hong Kong and need to eat, I highly recommend 洪利粥店茶餐廳 (Hung Lee), on Hau Fook Street 厚福街, which is not on the tourist map but is right in between Granville and Cameron, off of Carnarvon.
The 粥店 part means they serve jook, etc. (the etc. part being noodles). The 茶餐廳 part means they serve milk tea (奶茶) and other drinks, and Hong Kong-style breakfast (A餐 B餐, etc.). Before you go, brush up on your Chinese---I didn't see any English menus.
Wikipedia on 茶餐廳:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_chaan_teng
and the Cantonese version:
Hong Kong is so great. I forgot how great it was, after being in mainland China for so long. I forgot how great it was to have people smile at you when you pay for dinner, or be friendly when you pick up brochures at the tourist info booth. I forgot how nice it was not to live in a police state. (According to today's HK edition of the Epoch Times, foreigners in Beijing are afraid of the stern police marching around on the streets.) The police here can chat with each other while they're patrolling, they look like they enjoy their jobs, and they actually look like nice people.
Recently I've been listening to these one-minute segments on how to make your Cantonese more correct, called 粵講粵o岩一分鐘.
http://www.rthk.org.hk/elearning/bettercantonese/listenpro.htm
It's basically a big prescriptivist-fest, telling native Cantonese speakers to correct their "lazy sounds" and not merge /n-/ and /l-/, not drop initial /ng-/, etc. There's two "hosts": the guy is 何文匯, whose name is on various Cantonese dictionaries, and the girl is 黃念欣, who I don't know.
For some reason, the guy is really good at making you feel stupid. "People are too lazy to look up the dictionary," he says. Or, "if people would just think logically, they wouldn't pronounce things all wrong." The girl is much more encouraging, but says things like, "if you say things wrong, you'll sound really childish."
Despite the tone, there are some interesting etymological/philological notes in some of the segments, and I did learn some obscure characters which I've seen before but never knew how to read.
Although they can get rather pedantic, in some ways it's kind of reassuring that people are being prescriptivist about Cantonese, because that means people actually care about preserving the language... and that's a luxury not all languages enjoy.
