posted by John B on June 1, 2011 | 3 comments
大家好,

I'm curious if you guys could shed some light onto the magnitude of the differences between Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou and in Hong Kong. Most of the media that I've been watching is from HK, and HK is where I want to end up living, but as I live in Shanghai all of the tutors I've found are from Guangzhou or the surrounding areas. How big are the differences? Where are some of the differences I should be on the lookout for.

唔該晒你哋 in advance!
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nicole on June 1, 2011 | reply
Hi John,

兒童節快樂!

The differences are not big really.

Tone-wise, native Guangzhou accent has 7 tones including the high falling while HK accent merges it into high flat. Vocab-wise, HK speech has more English words.

Here's an episode of my favorite Guangzhou soap/sit-com 外地媳婦本地郎(roughly translated as Non-local wives and Local Husbands), a very popular TV series in GD. It's mainly in Guangzhou Cantonese but you'll also hear Mandarin or Shandong-ese or even English spoken by some of the wives from outside Guangdong. Perhaps you could check it out and hear the differences yourself.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDUzOTk5Ng==.html

Hope it helps. Let me know if you've got more questions.
John B on June 2, 2011 | reply
Nicole,多谢晒!外地媳妇本地郎好好笑呀。:)
nicole on June 3, 2011 | reply
Hi John,

《外地媳婦本地郎》有好多粵語方言。超好笑!