乜我哋真係咁捍衛廣東話咩？咪講笑啦！ Do we really love our mother tongue?

這邊廂有穗港兩地的熱血青年上街保衛廣州話，那邊廂一眾港孩的父母卻前仆後繼，唔理三七廿一，明知自己的英文半桶水，卻全力堅持對子女只講英文。

英文，並唔係咁學㗎。

While we are excited about the young people from Guangzhou and Hong Kong taking it to the streets to defend our mother tongue Cantonese, isn't it an irony that a lot of parents in Hong Kong insist in speaking to their children ONLY in their broken English? 

A note

I returned home one day to find my dad has left me a note.
  
And suddenly it dawned on me that my father seldom writes in Chinese. Although he never had the chance to receive proper education (he studied in a primary school for one or two years only), he learned his English while working at an American firm. And since then, English has been his default written language.
  
I guess this, amongst other things, has made our family kind of "open" to foreign languages. While my parents were not the kind who speak to us in (bad) English and had never forced us to pointlessly memorize new words, we don't dislike English.
 
We watched English TV programmes and listened to English songs not because our parents wanted us to learn the language but simply because we enjoyed them. Of course that did help us learn new words and expressions but it's never forced and I think that's very important in second language learning.
 
I notice from my nephew and my friends' kids that nowadays children do have a tendency to "reject" English. My nephew hates it when I switch to an English TV channel. And he would always opt for the Cantonese dubbed version of his favourite Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks animations. Come dictation time, oh dear... This never happened to us.
 
I'm getting old, whinging too much haha ...
 
The society still acknowledge that English is important - or should I say getting good grades in English is very important. And so students simply go to a tutorial class to learn from those celebrity tutors all the tips and techniques to excel in public exams...

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.