Intermediate Cantonese | Interview with Dad about Immigrating to Canada

[@amyissavage9078]

I’m getting emotional just listening to this; the challenges that our parents faced while inmigrating to a new country. 😭 thanks for this!

[@StratosFair]

Amazing interview and amazing Cantonese learning material, thank you. Much respect to your dad, seems like a great man !

[@felipealexandre3556]

Brittany, your videos are great and I hope you resume making them again soon. 加油

[@etoilesvives]

This was very emotional to listen to. I hope that I can have a conversation like this with my mom one day. It broke me when your dad said he didn't want his children to think that English was more important than Cantonese. Because that definitely wasn't taught in my family. Thank you for sharing

[@exo_nct_wayv_redvelvet]

not only it has jyutping but you guys pronounce the words very clearly/a bit slow so learners can understand. AMAZING. Thank you so much. It's really hard to find some content about cantonese language, I can speak but can't write so the videos help me a lot. 😊

[@cantobritt]

Glad to hear. Make sure to check out my video on podcasts if you haven’t already, has good resources for heritage speakers!

[@wchu5518]

I totally understand your family background and history. Great video. Speaking the language of your parents is important.

[@Solaniin]

My father was born in British HK in '56. He moved at the age of 4 to London and lost his Cantonese culture and language: although my dad never learned Chinese, he still wanted me to grow up seeing having more than one culture and language is beautiful. Now, I can read Chinese newspapers and books thanks to my dad's encouragement. Seeing this touched me because your dad's story seems like he really had the best in mind for you and your brother. I hope someday to be as fluent as you.

[@aeophylus]

Thanks so much for your channel, Brittany. I am beginning to understand how Cantonese can be written word for word to how it is spoken. It's also a great way to learn traditional chinese characters which I feel is a lot more fun to learn and write than simplified. Keep up your excellent videos.

[@karmenwatson1758]

Thank you for doing this with English, Chinese characters, and Jyut Ping. I am half Chinese in the UK trying to connect with the language my extended family speak but which sadly disappeared somewhat in my immediate family. This resource will really help me do a bit more learning every day, especially as I can connect the sound with the characters to help me work out what word is what!

[@rosanin7068]

Hi Brittany, thanks for making these videos. Your Cantonese is very easy to follow. Thank you for sharing your dad's story with us, it was very engaging, I really enjoyed this format.

[@kotosif]

I'm actually jealous of your Cantonese skills! My parents immigrated to the UK from Hong Kong, and although they speak to me in Cantonese and sent me to Chinese school on the weekends to learn Cantonese for a while when I was young, I was just never able to retain the language. Mainly because I just never needed to use it in my daily life. Fast forward to the present, I'm now 23 years old and I can't hold a meaningful conversation with my parents properly due to my broken Cantonese. Hence that's why I'm glad to have found your channel. I was wondering if you had any tips for getting better at Cantonese?

[@cantobritt]

I think the key for someone like you is to find an enjoyable way to practice every day. You can listen to Cantonese radio, watch Cantonese TV or find a partner to practice with. The most important thing is making it a habit and priority. I think 15-30 minutes per day is a good place to start. For tutoring, I can recommend the online platform iTalki. The TVB app has a lot of Cantonese shows and news. For dictionaries, I use the Pleco app and Cantonese Sheik. I also like listening to the local Cantonese radio station. Hope that helps!

[@heathersaxton8118]

As someone who’s learning Cantonese and have a lot of experience with language learning including improving my own heritage language (my family is also immigrants) I agree with brittany’s advice! Since you already have a base, you will improve very fast once you make Cantonese part of your daily life, just chatting with people and consuming media like movies and radio you enjoy. If watching a full movie without English subtitles is a little overwhelming, try watching children’s shows is a great place to start. There are a lot of episodes of Peppa Pig available on KZbin for example, and some Japanese shows like Aggretsuko that have a fairly simple storyline are available with Cantonese dub on Netflix. If you make sure to listen to something every day and have active conversation with someone at least once a week you’ll make solid progress

[@messironaldo8622]

More and more hk people are moving to Canada owing to the politics. You may communicate more with them so that you may learn Cantonese more effectively. In the meanwhile, they may also learn English from you.

[@CantoneseCouple]

❤️ the Tim Hortons story. Your dad sounds like such a hard worker!

[@roundbunny]

i really really miss my dad right now (Cant see him due to covid) so i am trying to soothe my soul by watching your video!!

[@jamessmith1652]

I love dialogues. There are hardly any Cantonese dialogues with jyutping/Yale out there. Thank you!

[@JM-qq8jd]

WOW! Superb job Brittany. 👍👍👍👏👏👏

[@bringbackmy90s]

Great video and impressing family history! As a Russia-born German citizen I can truly relate to many things mentioned here. I'm glad I found this Cantonese Channel, although I did it way to late, hopefully I can still learn Cantonese one day. Thanks for your work and respect from Germany! HK Forever 萬歲

[@mattf2535]

Yeah thanks for sharing this story. Keep the language and heritage!!

[@johnliu8953]

I'm immigrants myself came America when I was little by listen you story about you dad balance between the west and east the language and the culture the most common struggle for the immigrants is the language you story is very touchy and inspiring I have tremendous respect those whom attempted to promote Chinese language and culture especially those juk shen aka abc thank you I'll continue watch you channel on you tube

[@antchovey5154]

Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to make this!

[@heathersaxton8118]

Great video, interesting topic! This is exactly the type of material I want ❤️

[@tedchan-music7468]

I think this is so true with most immigrants. It sure takes me down my own memory lane when I first emigrated to Toronto years ago. Thank you. 👍

[@darrellwong4097]

What great job you did interviewing your dad Brittany! It was really interesting and about the limit of my Cantonese skills! Your channel is an inspiration to me! I hope my daughters decide to learn Cantonese one day…. Not just Mandarin. Keep it up! 👍👍👍

[@fluffyclouds555]

The Tim Hortons story really allowed us to see the vulnerability of the immigrant experience. All of our parents went through this but, at least for me, we weren’t privy to these kinds of details. Thanks for sharing this with us.

[@yunlin6492]

Hi Brittany! I live in Vancouver and I started self-learning Cantonese about a month ago. So glad I found your channel, I've been binge watching your videos! It's such a treasure :) Thank you so much for putting in all the efforts with the jyutping, it really helped with practicing my speaking. Hopefully after a year or so I'll be able to carry daily conversations with my co-worker from GuangZhou (with the help from your channel haha). Thanks again for the great work!

[@rae8124]

1st impression is your father's voice makes me think of radiodramas actors voice 😄

[@beardan76]

A nice interesting chat with the old man!

[@AdamZhang]

Great work, Brittany! I'm working on an interview series myself, and this has some awesome vocab. Thanks!

[@kwanzv3738]

Yay advanced cantonese ! Thanks Brittany :) this really helped.

[@hiutoblendy3558]

您爸爸把聲好好聽！ Your dad's voice sound so good!

[@nancyliang4339]

This channel is perfect wow thank you! Sharing with my ABC friends.

[@cantobritt]

Thanks so much!

[@Wylie1224ww]

Really appreciate your effort👍🏾It’s a good idea to put on the Cantonese 拼音 so that people can try to practice it. subscribed from🇭🇰

[@cantobritt]

Thank you for your support!

[@chrischien6023]

So inspiring to hear this story, as someone with parents who also had to work fast food.... thank you so much for sharing this T---T

[@JV-ge8bm]

Thanks for sharing! Interesting story although the level is way too high for me lol

[@primafacie5029]

Great vid

[@fatearthworm]

Bravo!!!!!!!!

[@cantobritt]

Gracias 🙏

[@Tompsf1]

Brilliant!!!!!

[@dchinsee]

I could follow a bit without haha but thank god for subtitles, keep it up 👍

[@wklee69]

Cantonese seldom call daddy as 「爸爸」 but 「老竇」, but still I like the conversation with dad.... keep going Brittney

[@JL-oi8di]

同別人講就叫我老豆，自己對住佢會稱呼爸爸，叫老豆少了份莊重

[@markking3882]

Hi Brittany Just found your video by accident. They r excellent for learning Canto. Funny thing is Canto is actually so easy to learn due to it's simple sound system. ( Compare Vietnamese pronunciation and you'll understand my point) I just have some advice for you to make learning from your content a whole lot easier. Dump jyutping and use Sydney Lau romanisation. Check it out and I'm sure you'll agree SL is a far better system for native English speakers to read.

[@stevetong1969]

Can someone please tell me if zou6 (at 1:30) is the character 造? I tried looking the jyutping up in a dictionary and that's the closest resembling character but it doesn't have that squiggle on the left... www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=chardict&cdqcan=zou6&cdqcanr=1

[@stevetong1969]

Nvm, found out it's a font issue. Anyone know where I can get a font to stress that kink?

[@riverahansleyjohns.4398]

支持你！多謝你，你嘅channel可以幫我進步我廣東話

[@JamesWongLife]

Hey Brittany, thanks for making this. Though my Cantonese is still A1 level, I understood more than I thought due to some similarities to mandarin. One thing I would point out is that although this is really good for a studying point of view, from another it’s not very engaging and feels a little scripted. I would love to see you guys actually talking and having a more natural conversation, or having animations on top showing your father’s story like you did with previous videos. Chinese corner do really good interviews in mandarin. It’s obviously extra work though so you have to balance what you can.

[@cantobritt]

Thanks for your feedback, James! I have actually seen some of their videos and think they’re quite good. I had planned on doing some animation for this video but the subtitling (especially jyutping) took forever. Still figuring this whole KZbin thing out as I go along.

[@JamesWongLife]

Cantonese with Brittany yeah subtitles take forever! For jyutping, can’t you just drop the characters into a translator and it spits out the jyutping? I just realised we both have the same number of subscribers and started our channels around the same time! 加油 to both of us

[@cantobritt]

@@JamesWongLife 加油! I use a character to jyutping converter, but since so many Cantonese words have several different pronunciations and tones, there's almost always an error tucked away somewhere - high frequency words such as 哋, 重, 會.

[@백지훈-t4w]

00:03

[@rae8124]

This seems really courageous to leave for a country without mastering the language yet and not having a job secured. Maybe the fact there was already a chinese community made it appear less hazardous?