Why do hong kong people speak english

Any time you are stuck or need directions — your best bet is to find a policeman! It may take a few days to adjust to the how the locals pronounce certain words. See here for a breakdown of where some of the pronunciation is different from what you might be used to.

Any time you venture away from these main tourist areas, you will find the prevalence of English becomes less. Smaller restaurants and shops in less central areas and also taxi drivers are some scenarios where you may struggle, though as we said they will often be able to call over someone who does speak English.

If you stay in some less luxurious hotels 3 star or less or deal with older people over 60, then also expect less people to speak English. Also have your hotel staff write down the names of places you want to visit in Cantonese to hand to cab drivers to avoid any confusion with where you want to go.

For some of the smaller and medium sized restaurants, some of the waiters may not be able to speak much English. If this happens they usually just call over the manager or someone else who does speak English.

Having some basic phrases in the local language also helps — see our section below. One way or another you can still get by. In general since the handover of Hong Kong to China in , Mandarin has become the more important language, with the emphasis on English declining, although there have been some efforts to improve the teaching of English in schools. Tourist experiences are actually somewhat mixed on the issue of how prevalent English was when they were there.

Some people report being able to go for many days in a row there only speaking English and get on fine; others reported they were surprised by the lack of English there and did sometime struggle to be understood. I spent many years living and working in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is a wonderful city to live, work, and be an ex-pat, but like many ex-pats who live in Hong Kong, I do not speak fluent Chinese. You can live in Hong Kong and speak only English. Many Hong Kong people speak English. Hong Kong is a former British Colony, so English is one of the official languages.

In Hong Kong, the police, courts, restaurants, banks, and shops, people will usually speak English; many schools are English speaking schools. After living, working and traveling to Hong Kong for many years, here are my 10 top reasons why you can easily live in Hong Kong and speak only English:. English is one of the official languages in Hong Kong. English is used widely in government, academic circles, business, and most aspects of life in Hong Kong.

Signs on the street are in Engish, also signs in places as the MTR Mass Transit Railway or the subway system plus other trains, buses, and local transport. The streets in Hong Kong all have English and Chinese names. All the government offices also use English and Chinese, so working with the Government offices is very easy; everything from filling out immigration forms to other government forms accepts English and Chinese.

This means that a large proportion of the people you meet in Hong Kong will be able to speak, write and read English fluently.

Even though many people are fluent in English, you may find that the English is a bit different than the English you are used to hearing. In Hong Kong you also use the British spelling versus the American spelling of a word.

In fact in most schools in Hong Kong British English will be taught. I have found it quite easy to understand Hong Kong English, but some other countries may find it difficult to understand. In recent years another language that has gained a lot of popularity and which many Hong Kong is learning is Mandarin Chinese.

This is because a lot of business today in Hong Kong is being conducted in Mandarin Chinese. Mainland China also uses simplified Chinese characters, whereas many in Hong Kong read the more traditional Chinese characters, which are also used in Taiwan.

You can see many of the simplified Chinese characters on some posters, leaflets, and signs in the tourist areas in Hong Kong. This is where the miscommunications might happen, Cantonese speakers might just be unfamiliar with the terms or vocab that you are speaking of, and just sort of assume that you are saying a word not accurately, so at this time they might just switch to a language that they assume you are comfortable with.

For nouns, that generally how it works, first character being the description, second character is the item or category which forms a noun. Do you call English word as Cantonese word? If vocabulary is your issue, I would suggest that you continue building your vocabulary, some ways could be to watch Cartoons, read comics, do stuff in Cantonese that you might enjoy, let it be taking Cantonese classes, cooking Cantonese food with Youtube video, whatever you can find joy is going to keep motivating your Cantonese learning.

Cantonese speakers from different regions might be used to a particular sentence structure, and be thrown off when people use a different sentence structure.

Say for example, back when I was in secondary school, there was a Cantonese speaking classmate from mainland China. So he was sort of the passive voice here if we understand it with English. Literally he said, my water bottle made lost. The Hong Kong Cantonese speaking classmates were all very confused. That did not make any sense, how could he possibly jam his water bottle? The only difference is in the ending consonants or sounds.

Literally I do no see past tense my water bottle. Basically to say I did something and lost my water bottle. Sometimes the mainland version of the Cantonese can sound a bit like they are reading from a script, like it sounds very formal and like written Chinese. In a way, you can understand the mainland Cantonese is sort of a hybrid between Mandarin and Cantonese, whereas the Hong Kong Cantonese is more of a hybrid between Cantonese and English.

My point is, regardless of what language you speak, when you form Cantonese sentences, you are likely to have the tendency to form sentences with the sentence structures that you already know in your known languages.

So again, really pay attention to how native Cantonese speakers form their sentences, you can then mimic and start replacing words with the correct verbs and nouns and all that stuff that you know once you get a hang of it.