LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Cantonese
built 622 days ago
Cantonese opera isn't something most Americans are familiar with. The music can sound harsh and discordant to the unaccustomed ear. So it's no surprise that the audience for Cantonese opera in this country is largely limited to older Chinese immigrants. But there's an effort to change that in the San Francisco Bay area. Zoe Corneli of station KALW reports.
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Foremost in importance among non-Mandarin dialects, Cantonese is the primary means of communication in Hong Kong, Southern China and many of the Chinatown neighborhoods around the United States. In this course, students learn to read, write and speak from the first session, with all of these elements balanced throughout the course of study. The instructor is a native speaker of Cantonese with an advanced degree in Chinese language and literature. Lessons are enhanced with supplementary materials where useful. Knowledge of Mandarin is helpful, but not a prerequisite.
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Unfortunately, Cantonese cooks have had difficulty reproducing their native cuisine in a foreign land. As cookbook author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo points out in an interview, the first immigrants were men, coming from a society where women traditionally did all the cooking. Furthermore, faced with unfamiliar ingredients, they made adaptations that were less than successful.
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Every syllable in Cantonese has a pitch that is an integral part of the pronunciation of that syllable. Pitch distinguishes one syllable from another. Cantonese has a more complex tonal system than Mandarin with six to nine tones, the number depending on the system of classification. One of the systems lists three level and three contour (rising or falling) tones.
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Established since 1992, Ocean Empire International Ltd mainly operates Ocean Empire Food Shop and Welldone Food Company (Central Factory) for the sales of traditional Cantonese congee favourites. The company has applied the up-to-date management skill to the conventional congee business and becomes the first congee chain shops in Hong Kong.
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The so-called "Battle between Cantonese and Mandarin" started in Hong Kong in the mid-1980s when a large number of non-Cantonese speaking mainland Chinese people started crossing the border into Hong Kong during Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. At that time, Hong Kong and Macau were still under British and Portuguese rules respectively, and Mandarin was not often heard in those territories. Today Mandarin is often taught as a second language in those areas, but is not used at all in daily life by anyone except immigrants from the Mandarin speaking parts of the mainland. Businesspeople from the mainland and the colonies who did not share a common language shared a mutual dislike and distrust of one another, and in magazines in China in the mid-1980s, they would publish polemics against the other's language - ... Cantonese became known on the mainland as "British Chinese" - and Mandarin became known as "æµæ°“話 Lau Man Waa" - literally "outlaw speech" - in the colonies.
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Cantonese