With an estimated 100 million non-Chinese around the world learning Putonghua, Cantonese remains opaque to foreigners. There is no standardized teaching platform. Some have advanced the opinion that Cantonese is simply too difficult for outsiders to master. Steven Chen reports.

Wander through any major city on the mainland these days and it won't be long before you'll overhear an animated conversation in rapid-fire Putonghua, only to turn around and find one of the people talking is a foreigner.

With the national language now spoken fluently or being studied by an estimated 100 million non-Chinese around the world as of 2010, it begs the question: with Hong Kong an entrepot for business and a dynamic city with a history of welcoming people from all over the world to its shores, why has there never been a standardized platform for teaching Cantonese to non-Chinese?

The short answer may be that Cantonese, with its larger number of tones, significant differences between its spoken and written forms and jam packed with ever changing idioms, slang and truncated phrases, is just "too difficult", for anyone to bother streamlining for study. For the long answer, it helps to begin our quest at a point far back in time.

"Foreigners first began trying to learn Cantonese in the 1600s, during the early trade between China and the outside world," says Cedric Lee, a professor of linguistics and head of the Cantonese program at the New Asia Yale-in-China Chinese Language Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

"The first outsiders to try to learn Cantonese were traders and missionaries from Europe who needed to learn the language for themselves and wanted to pass this knowledge on to other Europeans."

After trade through Hong Kong opened and then rapidly expanded, the 19th century, with more foreigners arriving in what was becoming a burgeoning center for business, Cantonese became important to four groups: officials of the colonial government, traders, diplomats and priests, says Lee. The efforts of these disparate individuals, each with his own reason for learning, with his own method of communicating with locals, gave rise to an ad hoc way of accessing the language that has never been unified.

"Foreign traders had their own interpreters who acted as links between them and local businesses. (Colonial) government staff, posted to Hong Kong, employed their own translators. They were required to learn the language also, but there may have been limited reasons to do so." As a city under foreign rule, "it would have been wise for a local to learn the language of the government, that is, English, to advance themselves. Speaking English was seen as a sign of advancement and education, while Cantonese would have been seen as the language of subordinates", says Lee.

In more recent times - the 1960s and 1970s - government staff were required to study Cantonese during the first two years of their tenure, but again there may have been little encouragement from local Chinese, he adds. "With a foreign government making the rules and being involved in many aspects of their lives, discouraging foreigners from learning the language may have been a form of self-defence. Speaking in Cantonese would have been a way of keeping a part of their world to themselves. And with Cantonese being seen as somehow inferior, they may have been discouraged from using it with non-Chinese."

With no government-backed program for the wider population, disparate needs and a lackluster response from locals creating a learning vacuum that persists today, it is arguably little wonder foreigners have had scant motivation to acquire the language.

With their status as VIPs, foreign diplomats would have had even less motivation to learn, says Lee.

"The fourth group were priests and missionaries, sent here to open local churches or missions. They needed Cantonese to speak to local Chinese in the course of their work. In fact, the first known dictionary was written by a priest."

The priest, Robert Morrison, in fact the first Protestant missionary to be sent to China, created his work using a character-based writing system, or Romanization, that could be read by English speakers, to provide a guide to the sounds of Cantonese that could be used when communicating with new converts. Others, including priests of his time, and later academics, followed with their own versions, giving rise to a diverse range of systems that persists to this day with at least six different types of Romanization of varying popularity in use to teach or express Cantonese.

Yale Romanization, developed in the 1970s under a program managed by Yale University is, today, arguably the most popular of these, with a number of institutes, including CUHK, and books on learning Cantonese, using the system.

But Yale is by no means the standard, with Jyutping, developed in 1993 by the government in conjunction with the Linguistics Society of Hong Kong, gaining prominence in its own right. Jyutping, utilized by the government to determine romanizations of local street, district and other names and words in the public domain, supplants the earlier Eitel/Dyer-Ball system that had been in use since 1960. Before this, there were no standardized forms at all. The result is that romanized words throughout the territory are a grab bag of various systems, exceptions-to-rules and popular renderings left untouched because of tradition. But while the fledgling Jyutping is useful, it is only used for rendering, not teaching, spoken Cantonese.

"The difficulty with the system (for students) is that it uses numbers, not accent marks, to express tones, which is not as intuitive," says Lee.

While establishing a standard romanization for public consumption has been difficult, finding one for teaching spoken Cantonese has been equally elusive.

Historically, the only widespread teaching of the language in the SAR has been by the government for its non-local staff. A variety of systems had been used to teach the language over the years, however, up until 1996, these civil servants were taught in-house using a system created in the 1960s by Sidney Lau, then head of the government's language center. After 1996, six-week intensive courses were introduced for those who had studied up to intermediate level and wanted to continue their careers after the handover, since permanent government positions required them to pass a language test. The programs, focusing on spoken Cantonese only, ceased altogether in 2003 and have not been replaced, say staff from the Civil Services Bureau. The reason cited is a drop in demand - itself arguably as a result of a decrease in the number of foreign civil servants, estimated at around 1,000 in the early 2000s but likely to be much lower today, and the rising importance of learning Putonghua.

These have been the only hands-on attempts by the government to teach the language to non-Chinese. But, in sponsored surveys, even this group cited the lack of readily available and consistent learning materials, a lack of reading and writing literacy, and reticence from locals to using Cantonese when spoken to, as hurdles to achieving an advanced command of the language.

Today, government involvement in language study is coordinated through the Education Bureau and its Curriculum Development Council, which develops guidelines for schools, Standing Committee on Language Education and Research, which advises on language learning, especially Putonghua, for adults, and the Continuing Education Fund, a grant to subsidize studies, that is available to the public, say staff from the relevant organizations respectively. The Continuing Education Fund is aimed at encouraging locals to learn Putonghua and English, among a basket of other languages. Non-Chinese permanent residents are also eligible to apply for a subsidy, but Cantonese is not included among the list of target languages.

With government efforts to teach Cantonese historically limited, it has been left up to tertiary institutions like Yale-in-China and a small number of private tuition centers to fill the gap with their own methods of teaching the language, using a variety of romanizations, or adapted romanizations in their materials, or simply leaving it up to students to figure it out for themselves.

The challenging terrain is not helped by the fact that romanized Cantonese words are not understood by local Chinese, who communicate in spoken Cantonese but write using Chinese characters.

This linguistic nightmare lies in stark contrast to Putonghua, which utilizes pinyin, a standardized romanization that is taught to mainland children from an early age and is also used to teach non-native speakers the language. Giving direction to these efforts is the mainland's certified Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) proficiency examination that offers a quantifiable test of their skills, and a clear study goal for students.

One of the main elements that has assisted the wider learning of Putonghua by foreigners is the use of this pinyin system, says Lee.

Putonghua, which was launched in 1956, "was introduced to improve literacy levels around the nation, but also to provide a common platform of communication between a large group of people that spoke different dialects. No such platform was introduced in Hong Kong where everyone understood each other".

Since all mainland Chinese learn the system, Pinyin unwittingly provides a fast-track means of communication between native speakers and non-Chinese that Cantonese lacks.

The only light on the horizon in Hong Kong appears to be the Computerized Oral Proficiency Test developed and used by Yale-in-China for use in its courses. The test determines oral language ability in Cantonese and, while small, may be a step in the right direction. Plans are underway for the test to be adopted by the government's Vocational Training Centre and Baptist University, for use in their programs. However, given the limited and arguably diminishing appeal of Cantonese as a target language, how far any efforts will go without wider support is unclear.

With neither a standardized linguistic platform nor an internationally recognized proficiency test likely in Hong Kong anytime soon, it seems those keen enough to take on the language will need to, like the pioneers before them (see sidebar), find their own way.

Cantonese is spoken by an estimated 70 million people worldwide, including 50 million in Guangdong province alone. Such a vast number would appear to offer plenty of communication opportunities for interested foreigners. Ironically, despite the absence of standards, despite the absence of tests, it seems the most effective way for them learn Cantonese, is if native speakers do the learning.

(HK Edition 03/10/2011 page4)