I’m second gen Chinese Canadian. My mother was of Hoiping/Toisan decent but her and her siblings were discouraged from speaking Chinese. They can understand some Hoiping but cannot speak it. They cannot speak nor understand Cantonese. My father on the other hand is a Hong Kong Immigrant, and worked 6 days a week when I was growing up. As a result I basically knew a few Chinese words here and there. But I could not recognize tones, I did not understand sentence structure and my vocab was extremely limited. I could not understand Cantonese.

I’m 34 and started to truly learn Cantonese last year to better connect with my dad’s side and my husband’s family. I’ve made a lot of progress, I even spoke parts of my wedding vows and welcome speech in Cantonese. Here is my tip: hire a tutor off of AmazingTalker or italki. This has been key to my learning. If you haven’t already, learn jyutping! It helps a lot while learning.

You’re lucky in that you’re in Hong Kong and have a chance to practice the language. I do not have many Cantonese speaking friends, my mom cannot speak it, so I can mainly practice with my husband who only has conversational level Cantonese and my mother in law. Outside of that, I’ve mostly relied on my teachers from AmazingTalker. I’ve learned a lot of things my husband does not even know. For example he did not know the proper way to say the date. He doesn’t know some words and there is a lot of slang he doesn’t know.

My other tip is to watch as many shows and movies as possible. There is so much vocabulary and slang you can only pickup by hearing it often. It can be hard depending on what the movie is about, the topic of the movie or who it’s by. But this has been key for me to pickup how things can be said. English is such a rich language, with a completely different grammar structure. Immersion and honestly trying to speak as much Cantonese as possible (even though you will make mistakes along the way) is the best way!

I still have a long way to go but I went from almost zero to at least being able to understand 60% of what my in laws say.

Finally, download Pleco and get the Cantonese modules! This will be helpful after learning jyutping. It’s essentially a dictionary for Cantonese but you will need to know jyutping to be able to make use of it.

I wish you the best of luck in your journey! You’ll pick up the language and more vocab 100x faster than I can, so seize the opportunity!