Multi-tongues

I always get confused when talking to Hong Kongers. Like Singaporeans, they speak English, Mandarin and Cantonese (perhaps not all Singaporeans speak Cantonese, but I supposed most Singaporeans speak at least one dialect).

When I was in Hong Kong buying my Octupus card, my greatest trauma was deciding on which language/dialect to speak (and most importantly. they must understand me). I could speak Cantonese with my limited vocabulary and inaccurate pronunciation, else I could speak Mandarin and hope that they understand my Singaporean version. In the end, I decided that speaking English would enable better understanding.

Today the situation was even more confusing. My relatives came over from Hong Kong. Like my family, they are Teochews. So, I had a choice of speaking English, Mandarin, Cantonese or Teochew. I think I spoke Mandarin to my "long-distance" cousin in 1995. Today, I tried Mandarin but eventually ended up speaking English.

My Grandma protested 'coz she couldn't understand our conversation. What is in a language? JJ's Teochew pronunciation is very bad and full of English and Chinese terms, but she has no trouble conversing with my Grandparents.

In Shanghai, we didn't want the locals to understand us, so we couldn't speak English or Mandarin but resorted to speaking Hokkien.

I think knowing a number of languages/dialects is useful.