But he has been drawn to Cantonese for so long that he has signed up for a year of weekly lessons at a Beijing education centre called KUG. Other mainlanders are attending classes with at least one other Beijing centre and online, eager to learn the language spoken by 80 million people, including those in Guangdong, Macau and Hong Kong.

KUG is run by Justin Lao Fan-ieong, a businessman who was born in Macau in the 1980s and grew up in Hong Kong.

“Most students come here with three types of motivations – personal interest, for their jobs with Hong Kong companies, or to prepare themselves before going to Hong Kong for study or work,” Lao said at his centre on a Saturday afternoon, when a class of 10 was under way.

After graduating from a British university in 2010, the native Cantonese speaker worked full-time as a fund analyst in Shanghai, and did part-time work at a language centre to make ends meet.

That was when he realised that many mainlanders were interested in learning Cantonese. Hoping to promote Cantonese language and culture, which he is proud of, he set up his language school in Shanghai in 2013.

He opened the Beijing branch in 2017, after running online courses which have so far attracted more than 20,000 students from across the mainland.

KUG is known as gong nei zi in Cantonese, or gang ni zhi in Mandarin, which roughly translates into “Hong Kong, you know”.

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In the classroom at his centre, Hong Kong slang such as ceoi seoi and wan sik – literally, “blowing water” and “looking for food” – is scrawled on the whiteboard.

Teacher Wang Zitao, in his 20s and from Guangzhou, asks his students to guess the meanings of the Cantonese phrases. Soon, smiles break out as they learn that “blowing water” is not just spraying spittle but the Cantonese way to say chit-chat, while “looking for food” means finding a way to earn a living, so stomachs can be filled.

The 30-hour course costs about 2,000 yuan (US$298) and is not cheap, considering most mainlanders earn a few thousand yuan a month. Yet the centre has 70 students in eight classes every week.

Among them is Lyu, whose interest in Cantonese was sparked when he visited Hong Kong as an 11-year-old to participate in a piano competition.

“The tour guide taught us some simple Cantonese vocabulary like counting from one to 10. I found the pronunciation very beautiful, with some of the intonation sounding like do-mi-so,” Lyu said, referring to the notes on the musical scale.

He was also impressed by Hong Kong, which seemed like a dazzling metropolis compared with his hometown and other mainland cities at the time.

Later, as a university student in Beijing, he started listening to Cantonese songs online and became a fan of the late Hong Kong pop legend Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, Hui, rock band Beyond and other singers.

Soon he was hooked. Even his WeChat username is Silence is Golden, the title of a song composed by Cheung with lyrics by Hui.

He said another of Hui’s hits from the 1970s, Lang Zi Xin Sheng, resonates particularly because it reflects his world view, with lyrics that say people should enjoy life by being content with what they have, instead of fighting destiny when things do not go their way.

Another KUG student, Xu Duoduo, 24, grew up in Fujian but went to Hong Kong regularly with her family to visit relatives, so Cantonese was part of her life from childhood.

Later, while studying in Macau, she picked up Cantonese by watching television drama series produced by Hong Kong broadcaster TVB. She eventually could speak the language, but decided to take classes to learn it formally.

“I would like to go to Hong Kong to further my career, as I think it is an ‘elite city’ filled with talent and professionals,” said Xu, who works in public relations.

Lao said most of his students were aged between 20 and 40, and were influenced by Hong Kong pop culture and the city’s golden age of entertainment in the 1980s and 1990s when its movies and pop songs were popular on the mainland and across Southeast Asia.

As times changed, those born in the 1990s were influenced more by Hong Kong dramas as well as the city’s food culture, with Hong Kong-style restaurants becoming popular in the mainland too.

“Culture is transmitted by language – so we always share local news and culture with our students too,” Lao said.

At least one centre in Beijing focuses on online Cantonese courses only, with teachers from Hong Kong and Guangzhou forming WeChat groups with students who upload homework by recorded voice messages. They pay 450 yuan for 20 sessions.

Hongkonger Ric Ho Ting-wai, 32, has been running two Cantonese language centres in Shenzhen since 2016, and last year opened a branch in Beijing in partnership with relatives living there.

While Shenzhen is in Guangdong where Cantonese is spoken, Beijing is different and he is testing the waters. For now, his new centre runs only one class a week, with fewer than 10 students.

Unimpressed by the availability of online language lessons, he said: “Students prefer face-to-face learning, as language skills improve through interaction.”

Recent years have seen tension between Hongkongers and mainlanders, with complaints in the city about the influx of mainland tourists, shoppers and migrants, while some mainlanders have disapproved of Hongkongers’ pro-democracy protests.

But Lao did not think politics would get in the way of mainlanders keen to learn Cantonese or attracted to Hong Kong.

“I don’t think individual incidents affect their interest in Hong Kong culture,” he said. “A student joked that he really wanted to learn Cantonese to avoid being scolded while visiting Hong Kong!”