Experdize Cantonese Home - Applied

How to play: this is a language game wearing a Cantonese house. You are 媽媽, and you are not running the household — the house runs itself: she walks to the stove, the sink, the washing machine, the ironing board and the medicine cabinet on her own, and potters about sweeping and tending the 神樓 when nothing is wanted. What you do is read Cantonese and answer two questions.

Take as long as you like. There is no time limit and nothing to beat the clock to: a day is 10 questions, and it ends the moment you answer the last one. One question is up at a time, and the whole house stands still whenever anybody is talking — nobody walks, nobody asks for anything 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 house 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 day is kept.

1 — Which job? Somebody says what is wanted: 哥哥件恤衫好皱呀。 — “Ming’s shirt is terribly creased.” Pick the chore off the row along the bottom. ⚠ The wrong answers are not random, they are the mistakes worth making once: 沖茶 make tea against 沖奶粉 make up a bottle — one verb, two objects — and 洗衫 wash, 晒衫 hang out, 燙衫 iron, all three taking 衫 — one object, three verbs. Read half a phrase and it is a coin toss. Pick the wrong job and she is not stopped: she does it, sees it is not what was asked for, and starts again — which costs her the walk and the work, in front of you.

2 — Who is it for? She finishes and asks herself 呢件恤衫俷邊個呢？ The answer is the name in the same sentence, and the row offers the household: 爸爸 Dad, 媽媽 Mum, 阿公 Grandad, 阿婆 Grandma, 哥哥 big brother, 妹妹 little sister and BB the baby. Take it to the wrong person and they hand it back, kindly, and she walks on to the right one.

⚠ The family words ARE the lesson. Cantonese keeps one 我 for everybody, so it is the FAMILY WORD that says who is meant. A child asking for something is named 妹妹 or 哥哥, not “I”; Grandma is 阿婆 and Dad is 爸爸. When the sentence names somebody, the answer is that person, and knowing the seven family words is the whole of the second read. Lines soften with 啦 or 呀 too — the particles that make a request sound like a request rather than an order.

The days are the words, and the household is the day. They climb together. The Difficulty row is how much of each line is written: Beginner writes the say-it-like-this and the English under every line, Intermediate the say-it alone, Advanced the Cantonese with nothing under it. The Day row is who is at home and what there is to do: day 1 is the two children and the school run, day 2 brings 爸爸 and his breakfast before work, day 3 阿婆 and her tea and medicine, day 4 BB and the washing, and day 5 阿公 and supper for the whole house. From day 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. The children go to school and come back, and 爸爸 goes to work and comes home before supper.

You cannot lose a day. Somebody who waits too long gives up and does it themselves — that costs you the happiness and your streak, and somebody says so — but nothing ends the day except answering its last question. What varies is your time and how many you got right.