My Cantonese-Mandarin Experience

Today I will be going to talk about my Mandarin-Cantonese experience as a native Cantonese and Mandarin bilingual. As an old Chinese saying goes, “We can know a world through a blossom”, we can thus better understand changes in Guangzhou society since 2000 based on my experience dealing with these two languages. Obviously, their relationship is not a simple story.

It is quite surprising to think about the fact that before I went to primary school, I had not formally known anything about, not to say have seriously learned, Mandarin. My home is located in the centre of traditional Cantonese culture, a district called Xiguan. All my neighbors are local Cantonese people; none of my relatives can speak fluent Mandarin. Overall, the only Mandarin input at that time was from my favorite cartoon on TV, Happy Goat and Big Wolf, which is probably the most popular Chinese cartoon for my generation.

I would like to emphasize the circumstances in school. Generally speaking, competition in the whole society at that time was far less intense than that nowadays. The majority of children went to kindergartens in their communities. (However, as we all know that in today’s society many parents have incredibly high expectations of their kids. Many friends of my parents’ spent a great amount of money sending their children to private schools which are not only expensive but also far from home.) As a result, all of my classmates and teachers in my kindergarten were local Cantonese people. Conversations between children, teachers, as well as teachers and children were all in Cantonese. The language of instruction in class was also Cantonese. Although it was more than 15 years ago, I still have a clear recollection that my teacher would come to my bed every noon and kindly “scolded” me, “点解仲唔瞓觉( a Cantonese sentence, meaning “why haven’t you fallen asleep yet”)!” (Because I always rolled back and forth and even tried to chat with other kids sleeping next to me.)

It was a similar case in primary school, to everyone’s surprise though, since children are expected to start learning standard Mandarin in primary school. All of my classmates and teachers were local people, so in classrooms where the posters read “please speak Mandarin at school” and “Mandarin is the language in school”, we had almost all courses in Cantonese. Looking back, maybe it exerted a somewhat deleterious influence on my Mandarin learning later. Nevertheless, in six years of primary school, speaking Cantonese in school and at home though, I started to read Mandarin books and certainly finished homework in Mandarin. Therefore, input and output of Mandarin were much more than those in kindergarten. However, I am sure that, (if the critical period does actually exist), my “proficiency” in Mandarin was noticeably lower than that of my classmates in junior and senior high school who speak Mandarin as L1. (Certainly, it is not professional at all to talk generally about “proficiency”, but I have to do with this term since I have not yet figured out all specific differences in proficiency. I am going to discuss writing now, whereas other aspects like pronunciation and grammar have not been looked into.) 

Junior high school was a transition period, which I would not like to focus on in detail. Nevertheless, it should be accentuated that since I went to one of the most prestigious private junior high schools in my city, quite a few classmates are not Cantonese people. All teachers spoke Mandarin in classes, and I was given more opportunities to be exposed to and use Mandarin (or say I had to, to some extent). Whereas I still spoke Cantonese at home.

Changes in senior high school were the most dramatic, I should say. My school is an elite school, so every student, no matter which district he lived in, could apply for it. In consequence, the percentage of Cantonese-speaking classmates was low to a rather high extent, which was closely linked to the demographic changes in my hometown. I have no memory of speaking any single sentence in Cantonese in the whole three years at school. At the same time, a disturbing problem started to arise. The fight against it accounted for a large part of my senior high school life. This process was deluged with struggles, as well as deep feelings and thoughts.

That problem was writing, Mandarin writing, to be exact. Honestly, my average academic performance in Chinese was not bad during the three years, but actually it was because I was quite good at the reading part, including analysis of ancient poems and proses. Yet my writing was never satisfactory, except the unexpectedly high scores several times .

In fact, I became aware of this problem in junior high school. My Mandarin writing lacked “beauty of language” ( “文采” in Chinese), which was, I often believe, owing much to the influence of Cantonese. I would write “回过头” for “回头”；“凉爽” for “凉快”；“你看先” for “你先看”… None of these are authentic Mandarin expressions.

I had no idea how to tackle the problem, and thus I spent a large amount of time memorizing good Mandarin phrases, sentences, or even entire articles. However, I also understood that the weakness had to be at least partially attributed to poor Mandarin “essential training in childhood” ( “幼功” in Chinese). There was no way to catch up with my classmates in just three years. As a result, I dedicated a lot of energy and time to doing tons of reading exercises to offset the gap in writing scores.

I have been thinking about this problem this year. It is a pity that there is not much relevant research. Now my thoughts can be summarized into two points (also taking many examples around me into consideration). 1) The gap in “beauty of language” does exist. 2) Some Cantonese-speaking classmates can be good at writing. Hence, a large amount of Mandarin input (mainly reading) and output (mainly writing), as well as optimal corrective feedback can help narrow that gap. Certainly, as a process of language acquisition, language aptitude and motivation and so on will also make a difference.

Another significant change during senior high school was that I preferred to speak Mandarin at home. It was not because I did so on purpose to improve my Mandarin, but because, to my parents’ and my disappointment, I just got used to it. From 7:30 in the morning to 5:30 in the late afternoon, I was immersed in Mandarin for ten hours every day. In the evening, after the deduction of time spent on homework and sleep, there was less than one hour for me to chat with my parents. In this case, I naturally chose to speak Mandarin with them. It was during the discussion of what I should major in in the summer of 2020 that such a change in language preference really shocked me. Throughout those two weeks, my family and I had several incredibly serious conversations ( I knew that most of my classmates were in the similar circumstances, since such a thing was inevitable after the University Entrance Examination.) I suddenly felt that talking about serious topics in Cantonese was unnatural, awkward, and even embarrassing. As a result, I spoke Mandarin and they Cantonese, fortunately they did not find anything strange.

The above was my Mandarin-Cantonese experience during these twenty years. Since I was born, the mobility of population in my hometown has been continuously increased and apparently the trend will go on in the future. Accordingly, Cantonese is no longer the only dominant language in the local language landscape. Most salient examples of this shift are always found in young people, including me as one among so many. In the winter vacation when I went to drink tea in the tea stand with my family ( “去茶楼喝茶” in Chinese), I heard women who sat around the table next to ours discussing how their grandchildren dropped Cantonese after going to kindergarten; my cousins are not willing to speak Cantonese after going to primary school; I once came across a grandpa in the elevator in my flat, who talked to his grandchild both furiously and sadly, “點解唔講白話，阿爺唔會普通話.”( “Why don’t you speak Cantonese? Your grandpa doesn’t know Mandarin!”)

Personal language choice and governmental language policy are complicated. Promoting Mandarin is necessary, and value of local dialects is irreplaceable. Whereas how to strike a balance between these two? Should we speak Cantonese or Mandarin to little kids at home? Should we teach them Mandarin before they go to primary school (and reduce their use of Cantonese), for the purpose of better academic performance? What is the influence of Cantonese on Mandarin writing (and also other aspects)? If the influence really exists, how to overcome it (or can it be overcome)? Is there any way for parents and schools to make joint effort to help children with Cantonese as L1 to catch up in Mandarin classes?

I try to ask myself these questions. Personally, I hope that my children in the future can speak Mandarin as L1 so that it is possible for the problem haunting me not to bother them; on the other hand, as a Cantonese person who loves the language, the culture, and the city, I cannot accept that my children do not speak fluent Cantonese… Truly, this is a question to which I have not had a definite answer yet.