Why you have to know Cantonese in Hong Kong - two foreign husbands explain
Japanese academic Shin Kataoka and linguist John Wakefield explain how they came to learn Cantonese and what they think the future holds for it
Many expatriates live in Hong Kong for decades without picking up more than the few Cantonese phrases needed to make their way home in a taxi.
Shin Kataoka is one of those rare people; he even wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of Cantonese. But the Tokyo native came with an advantage: he had majored in Chinese at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Now an assistant professor of Chinese at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, Kataoka taught Japanese at the University of Edinburgh before moving to Hong Kong in 1995, again as a language teacher. He married a Hongkonger who taught Cantonese, acquired a taste for local television dramas and in 2004 enrolled to pursue his doctorate at Chinese University.
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“When I learned to speak Cantonese, there were many books for beginners,” he says. “But I didn’t want to read them as they were too easy. There were no books for middle grade. So I eventually wrote one myself and I am writing other Cantonese books with my wife.”
