Welcome - 歡迎 - 欢迎 - Willkommen! I am a German living and working in Hong Kong, and this site is about my passion for learning languages, my work and more.
After moving to Hong Kong, I first started learning Mandarin Chinese and later Cantonese, the native language of Hong Kong people. Both have a reputation of being incredibly difficult, because they are tonal languages and their writing system uses tens of thousands of characters. However, they are just different, and that is not the same as difficult. In fact, after getting started I noticed that many aspects of Chinese, such as grammar, are simple for a native speaker of a European language. Like many other people who made a serious effort, I managed to achieve basic fluency (being able to have simple conversations comfortably without a lot of stuttering and awkward pauses) in both Mandarin and Cantonese within a few months.
My experience with Chinese got me hooked on learning languages, and I plan to become functional in the following Southeast Asian languages next: Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Indonesian. I am going to start with Thai, because I already had a little exposure to this language during a trip to Thailand, and some aspects of it reminded me of Cantonese. After that I will focus on either Tagalog or Indonesian, because it is easy to find native speakers of both in Hong Kong.
The purpose of this site’s blog is to keep a log of my language learning missions, and also to share my experience with Cantonese and Mandarin.