LettersIf Hong Kong wants to keep Cantonese alive, it must wake up to the sounds of it
- Some of the most precious features of Cantonese, such as its nine tones, are being lost due to a lack of emphasis on correct pronunciation in teaching
Despite scholars in Hong Kong saying that Cantonese is irreplaceable on the grounds of its having inherited traditional vocabulary and tones, which makes studying Chinese literature easier, hardly anyone has mentioned the fact that schools spend little time on phonics. The way we learn Cantonese is perplexing – mimicking our teachers and everyone around us.
Almost every country teaches the phonics of their common tongue before reaching the level of literacy. The language we pride ourselves on is one of the hardest to learn, with nine tones. Because of the lack of phonics teaching in our education system, lazy pronunciation is becoming more common, slowly destroying the language most of us consider superior to Mandarin.
For example, the word “you” is supposed to be pronounced as “néi” instead of “léi”, like most of us do nowadays. We can totally blame the lack of proper language teaching for this phenomenon.
It is ludicrous that, while we always use the long history and cultural values of Cantonese as an argument against the advocacy of Mandarin in Hong Kong, we ourselves are not interested in educating our future generation on the correct way to speak the language.