Experdize Cantonese Doctor - Applied

How to play: this is a language game wearing a Cantonese 診所. You are the 醫生, and you are not running the surgery — the surgery runs itself: she walks to the couch, the monitor, the laboratory bench and the medicine cabinet on her own, and files cards at reception and washes her hands when nobody is waiting. What you do is read Cantonese and answer two questions for every patient.

Take as long as you like. There is no time limit and nothing to beat the clock to: a session is 10 questions, and it ends the moment you answer the last one. One question is up at a time, and the whole surgery stands still whenever anybody is talking — nobody walks, nobody comes in and no patience bar moves — so you can read every line as slowly as you need. If a row of answers is up, choosing one starts the surgery again; if there is no row — she says she is on it, somebody grumbles, somebody says thank you — tap the play button on the speech bubble when you have finished reading it. The stopwatch at the top counts up rather than down: it is your result, not your deadline, and your fastest run at each session is kept.

1 — What is wrong with them? A patient describes their symptoms: 我吞啖口水都赤到痺。 — “it really burns when I swallow.” Pick the diagnosis off the row along the bottom. ⚠ Half the complaints name the illness and half only describe it, so you cannot get through by matching words alone. And the wrong answers are not random, they are the mistakes worth making once: 頭痛 headache, 肚痛 stomach ache, 腰痛 back pain and 牙痛 toothache — one word of pain and four parts of the body, so reading only the first character is a one-in-four guess. Pick the wrong one and she is not stopped: she examines for it, finds it is not that, and walks back to look again — which costs her the trip, in front of you.

⚠ And this is not the Mandarin clinic in traditional characters. A Hong Kong surgery says 睇醫生 and never 看醫生, 肚痛 and not 肚子疼, 而家 and not 現在 — and 冇, 唔, 咗, 緊, 啲 and 嘅 have no Mandarin counterpart at all. The jyutping's tone number is doing real work besides: Cantonese has SIX tones and three of them are level tones at three different heights, which an English ear is not trained to hear at all.

2 — What do you prescribe? She examines and asks herself 病人係喉嚨發炎。開啲乜嘢好呢？ — “the patient has a sore throat; what shall I prescribe?” Pick the medicine. ⚠ Six of the twelve carry the same character and the answer is the part in front of it: 退燒藥 bring-down-fever medicine, 止咳藥水 stop-cough syrup, 止痛藥 stop-pain medicine, 降血壓藥 bring-down-blood-pressure medicine. And one of them is a word Mandarin simply does not have: a drip is 吊鹽水, “hanging salt water”, where the mainland says 輸液. Four of the twelve are not medicines at all (吊鹽水, 打石膏 a plaster cast, 包紮 a dressing, 休息 rest).

⚠ Nobody says please, and that is not rudeness. Cantonese has no sentence-final particle carrying respect upward — no ạ to end a line with, the way the Vietnamese original does. What carries the courtesy instead is 醫生 at the head of the sentence and 唔該 in front of a request. The particles you will hear — 呀, 喇, 啦 — are softening and warmth, and putting one on the end does not make a line polite.

The sessions are the words, and the waiting room is the session. They climb together. The Difficulty row is how much of each line is written: 初級 writes the jyutping and the English under every line, 中級 the jyutping alone, 高級 the characters with nothing under them. The Session row is who is in the waiting room and what can be wrong with them: session 1 is 阿美 and 阿強 with fevers, coughs and aches; session 2 brings 小明, sore throats and flu; session 3 黃婆, cuts, dizziness and toothache; session 4 妹妹, food poisoning and allergies; and session 5 陳伯, broken bones and blood pressure. From session 3 what was said fades a few seconds later — tap whoever said it to hear it again, free but for the time, which is the one tap left on the floor. And somebody is sent down the corridor for a blood test and comes back with the slip.

You cannot lose a session. Somebody who waits too long gives up and goes to the pharmacy instead — that costs you the care and your streak, and they say so — but nothing ends the session except answering its last question. What varies is your time and how many you got right.