It was a brisk and frosty winter evening. Halfway home on the train, the dispatcher announced that there were some service changes that called for a detour. As soon as I had gotten off the train, an elderly Chinese couple approached me, throwing questions at me in a different dialect. Growing up, I’ve been surrounded with family and relatives who, occasionally, would speak Cantonese; thus, what the elderly couple was saying was understandable to some extent, though there were a few words here and there that I couldn’t comprehend. However, my problem was that I had no idea how to respond in their dialect. A little caught off guard, I asked them, in my dialect, if they could understand Mandarin. They responded, “Yes,” in Cantonese. As I gave them directions to the train they were to take in Mandarin, they would respond in Cantonese. I realized that since they couldn’t read a word in English, they certainly would have trouble finding their way around the station. I decided to lead them to their platform, while exchanging a few more lines, me speaking in Mandarin, and them speaking in Cantonese. Looking back at the occasion, my encounter with the elderly couple must have sounded a little silly to someone who can tell the difference between the two dialects.
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It’s probably not as silly as you think, but it is quite amusing if a person were to watch you throughout. In fact, it’s not at all surprising that those elderly understood Mandarin even though they could only speak Cantonese. From my experiences and my friends’ opinions, it’s actually not difficult to discern between Mandarin and Cantonese and understand both dialects if a person knew one or the other.
My primary dialect was Taishanness, my family and relatives all speak it – I presume it must have deviated from Cantonese because they sound very similar (although a friend of mine who could only speak Mandarin told me explicitly that he did not understand anything I said in Taishanness but could comprehend Cantonese). In my case, I was able to listen to shows and learn the Cantonese dialect without much trouble (back when I was eight or nine), same with Mandarin, because it’s only a variation of high or low pitch… for most words anyway. If you spare maybe a month of listening to Cantonese, I’m sure you’ll catch on to how the words are pronounced and maybe even learn to speak it!
It definitely isn’t as silly as you think. Many times when this happens and other Chinese people see this, they feel a sense of pride. An old saying is Chinese help Chinese. It reminds me of the time when a Mandarin speaking grandma approached me and asked for directions concerning which train to take as well. However, unlike you, my Chinese is horrible. Luckily my friend was there. My friend kept walking on but realized I was missing and decided to walk back in hopes of finding me. Upon finding me she also found a humble hunchbacked stranger standing next to me. My friend was fluent in Mandarin, so like you, she became the hero of that story.
This has happened to me before too, except I can’t respond in any dialect. My cantonese is terrible, so I can understand people and point, but I can’t respond. I think it’s really interesting and not silly that this conversation happened and that you could understand each other. It just shows that a language barrier can be overcome in a simple way.