Cantonese Dating: Say the Right Thing

How to play: you are on a date with Yan, and the whole evening happens in Cantonese. Yan speaks each line out loud — traditional characters on the card, with the Jyutping and English underneath at the easier difficulties — and you pick the reply that fits from four choices. A right reply wins a heart; a wrong one shows you the line that would have worked, teaches why, and the moment comes back around later, so every date ends well however it goes. Three dates make the story: the meetup where you ask Yan out, the dim sum lunch of small talk and paying the bill, and the night of the 表白 — the confession by Victoria Harbour. There is no losing and no time limit; the clock only remembers how long the evening took, and the hearts how smooth you were.

Every level is somewhere new. Level 1 is the plain stage; from Level 2 the date is shown in 3D and moves every level — home, a café, the playground, the movies, a dance club, the fireworks — starting quiet, with more people and more going on around you as the conversation goes on and the levels climb.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The Level row is where on the Lesson 13 scale the next date sits — the same levels the course wall is divided into, numbered the same way. Each level plays the date the lesson has reached: the lesson's early levels open the first meetings, and from level three the story holds at its fullest while the lesson keeps going. The three difficulties are how much of each line is written down: Beginner puts the jyutping and the English under every sentence, Intermediate the jyutping alone, Advanced the characters by themselves. The difficulty is a free choice at every level. It is the thirteenth lesson of the Cantonese course — everything Yan says is built from the words the earlier lessons teach.