Code-mix overload

It could only happen in Hong Kong.

I went to a seminar on internet marketing last week which made me wonder whether we are truly "bilingual". 

The seminar was supposed to be in Cantonese. While I appreciate that most of the participants use both English and Chinese on a daily basis, I started to feel really uneasy 10 minutes into the presentation. All I heard was way too much code-mixing. Indeed, a lot of jargons do not have a good/readily understood Chinese equivalent (in Hong Kong at least). But surely we could have done without dropping fillers like "that's why", "actually" all the time?

Imagine sitting for an hour listening to sentences like this:

that's why 每次 launch 一個 campaign 我地都要 make sure 個 ROI 係高，otherwise 就唔 worth 去做呢個 campaign。 

I mean, is it so difficult to translate those English words? After 30 minutes, I gave up. The fact that there was not enough "meat" in the seminar didn't help at all...

While trying to stay awake and look professional for the rest of the seminar, I thought that this could only happen in Hong Kong. In mainland China or in Taiwan, all these terms have a proper Chinese equivalent that people actually use and understand. In Singapore or Malaysia, the seminar would have been in English anyway.

And who can we blame but ourselves? Everyday we write and read emails, reports, letters in English. But most of the time we speak and "think" in Cantonese. We don't seek to improve either language. And, sadly, it seems to be the norm. Nobody questions it. If the English in the report you wrote wasn't that good, you're generally excused because of the fact that: 1. people who read it understood it; 2. you are not a native speaker; 3. as long as the content is good (correct), then it's fine. And so we all get by.