Spoken / Written Cantonese

[nickcripps]

I've noticed that the last 2 or 3 advanced audio blogs are in standard written Chinese 白話文(aka... Mandarin). I'm nowhere close to being advanced, let alone intermediate, so at the moment I'm not too bothered by it. If there are so many lessons here that use standard Chinese, then surely it means that learning would be useful to some extent...That's just my assumption.

So my question is... When do people speak Cantonese using standard Chinese? I assumed that something formal like the news would be spoken in standard Chinese, but I've watched Hong Kong news several times with standard Chinese subtitles and they speak using oral cantonese.

[heyheynicole]

Written Cantonese is mostly in Stardard Chinese using Mandarin grammar and traditional characters, as you can see in news subtitles, lyrics, essays and publications, sometimes even in text messages. In casual writing, mixed grammar and vocab (Cantonese and Mandarin) are used, like some of our blogs, depending on the writer's preference.

When speaking though, only when reading out the starndar Chinese is the standard Chinese used. In formal occasions, the speaker is supposed to employ formal words, and they do, but they at they same time use specific Cantonese words that doesn't exist in Mandarin, like 嘅(ge3, possessive partical), 系(hai2, to be), to make the speech sound natural because it's oral Cantonese.