HK rushes to learn Mandarin for 1997

HK rushes to learn Mandarin for 1997

By Kwan Chooi Tow

HONG KONG (Reuter): In a cramped Hong Kong classroom, multinational executive Fjorn Cho struggles with the vowels of Mandarin Chinese and an alphabet called pinyin.

She is among thousands of Hong Kong's Cantonese-speaking Chinese rushing to learn Mandarin to improve career prospects and communicate with their future rulers and fellow citizens after the British colony reverts to Chinese rule in mid-1997.

"It is quite hard, especially when it comes to words where we have to roll our tongues. In some ways, learning Mandarin is harder than learning English," Cho, who has been studying the dialect for two years, told Reuters.

"But in my job I have to deal with officials from China's stock exchanges. If we don't speak Mandarin, it seems as though we are very distant. Speaking the same language bridges the gap," she added.

Mandarin, also called putonghua or "plain speech", is China's official language, but can be incomprehensible to speakers of other Chinese dialects such as Cantonese or Hokkien.

Pinyin is an official spelling system that converts the pictorial characters of Chinese into a Roman alphabetized script, providing a guide to pronunciation and making it possible to translate Chinese names.

The vast majority of Hong Kong's six million mostly Chinese people speak Cantonese, an earthy southern Chinese dialect which is about as far from Mandarin as French is from English.

As Hong Kong counts off its final days under British rule after one and a half centuries as a colony, Mandarin is taking over some of the ground that English has occupied as a desirable and useful second business-tongue for the Cantonese speakers.

"Nineteen ninety-seven is approaching. Hong Kong people have to face the needs of a different environment," said Losina Fung, a secretary who is taking Mandarin lessons.

Mandarin and Cantonese share the common Chinese character script, as do all China's dialects, but the southern dialect's pronunciation and vocabulary diverge widely from Mandarin.

Adding to the confusion, the Chinese script used in Hong Kong is an older, complex, traditional version of characters, many of which have been supplanted on the Chinese mainland by simplified characters introduced by the communist government.

Distinctions between Cantonese and Mandarin are so vast, and the pronunciation of both is so subtle that mispronunciations often lead to blunders and blushes.

A local reporter, in halting Mandarin, recently asked the head of a Chinese aviation agency how a mainland airline could fly from the territory if "it did not have pigs and vegetables in Hong Kong as required by the Sino-British Joint Declaration".

Flashing a grin, the Beijing official replied tactfully: "Your question is too complicated, I can't answer it."

The reporter had mispronounced the Mandarin zhu ce, which means "register", as zhu cai, meaning "pigs and vegetables".

In the other direction, a Hong Kong newspaper, quoting a drugs suspect shouting abuse at a judge in court, wrote: "You foreign devils "shrimp' us yellow race. I curse you to die in three days."

The quote would have stumped Mandarin readers because the reporter used a character meaning "shrimp" because it sounds like the colloquial Cantonese word ha, meaning "to bully".

There is no corresponding word for ha in Mandarin. Formal Mandarin users would say qifu, which is written differently.

Rationalize

On a more serious and practical level, different Chinese terms and jargon used in professional spheres in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China have led to a need to rationalize terminology.

The Hong Kong Federation of Insurers, for instance, has compiled its own glossary of more than 1,000 insurance terms in Chinese in an effort to standardize terms in current use.

The growth in business links between Hong Kong and China, as the territory acts as a gateway for foreign investment in China proper, has accelerated interest in Mandarin in Hong Kong.

Kindergartens and schools offer Mandarin classes, lessons are available on the radio, companies hold Mandarin lessons for their staff, office workers go to evening classes and people belt out Mandarin pop songs at karaoke clubs.

Mandarin advertisements are appear on English and Cantonese television channels.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology found in a survey last year that many local firms preferred to hire graduates who can speak Mandarin. Many headhunters and job advertisements in the Hong Kong press now demand Mandarin.

At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, John Jamieson, head of the Chinese Language Center, has seen growing interest in its Mandarin courses in recent years.

Each year 2,500 undergraduates apply for 1,000 places in the course, said Jamieson, an American who first learned Mandarin at high school and then developed it at university in Taiwan.

"Student interest and anxiety over putonghua has been growing over the last few years," he said.

"The main factor is employment. They feel it is necessary to have it on their records when they apply for a job," he said. "With south China as one of the liveliest economic machines in Asia, and with so many jobs directed towards China business, there's been a necessity for Putonghua."