CantoPop Song lyrics...written or spoken Cantonese?!

呢個星期我睇好幾個電影. This week, I watched several films. Legend of the Liquid Sword (笑俠楚留香), Painted Faces (七小福), and a film called On Trial - or Job Hunter (失業生) starring lovely Leslie Cheung and Danny Chan.

The latter I quite enjoyed, and throughout the film, there was a lovely song called Having You (有了你). I thought it was such a pretty song, that I decided to search for the lyrics. I thought it would be a wonderful way of picking up some new Cantonese vocabulary, as from my previous language learning experience, I know how enjoyable as well as effective it can be to learn new vocabulary through songs.

I found the lyrics and noticed a familiar yet seemingly oddly placed character 的. I also noticed the characters 天 in 每日每天 and then the 了 in the title of the song 有了你 jumped out at me, bringing me to an important realisation. These song lyrics were written in Cantonese written form!

I listened to the song once more, while looking at the lyrics carefully. I had the correct lyrics and the characters 的, 天 and 了 were all spoken with Cantonese pronunciation. So, why was 的 used as a possessive marker? Why was 每天 used when 每日 had already been used before it? Why was 了 used at all? I did a little searching on Google, and found several articles which spoke about Cantonese song lyrics and how it is much more common for Cantonese song lyrics, post 1980, to be written using standard written Cantonese.

I have always known that when it comes to newspapers, books, signs, documents etc, that standard written Cantonese is used; this written form being the same as the written form of Mandarin. I have, thus, tried to avoid focussing on this written form, focussing my Cantonese learning more on the spoken variety. I didn't know, however, that songs were also most often written using the written variety!

Now, I am realising that it is inevitable that in order to learn Cantonese, one must have some knowledge of standard written Cantonese, especially if one wants to understand and be able to sing along to some good old Cantonese pop music.

I will continue with my mission of creating vocabulary lists which focus on spoken Cantonese, but I will bite the bullet and try to learn some of the more common words in standard written Cantonese as well. I found a list on CantoneseClass101 which gives us around 20 or so. For example:

English Written Spoken

's (possessive marker) 的 嘅

Sample sentence (written): 我的朋友。ngo5 dik1 pang4 jau5.

Sample sentence (spoken): 我嘅朋友。ngo5 ge3 pang4 jau5.

I am mind-blown and feeling a little overwhelmed after learning this, but that's how it is and there's nothing I can do about it except to learn the written equivalents little by little. I guess one good thing is that I have the experience of studying a little Mandarin in the past, so some of the characters are familiar to me, leaving only the Cantonese pronunciation of these characters to be learned. Furthermore, they aren't so different to the Mandarin pronunciation 了 (Mandarin = le5 / Canto: liu5) and 天 (Mandarin = tian1 / Canto: tin1)

Happy learning all!