Comment by gsf_emergency_6

11 days ago

Pedantry: most foreigners don't speak Cantonese in HQB

https://youtu.be/RTftU-8tkJc?t=16m34s

thanks! I hadn't been thinking retail though; I'd been thinking of people who were studying a language in order to signal that they were both interested in and committed to cultivating 关系 before exploring wholesale possibilities.

Wouldn't cantonese help with that? After all, languages are accomplishments, not acquisitions: you can't just buy spoken facility, you have to earn it through study and practice.

Or am I mistaken there too?

EDIT: another practical advantage: polyglots can code switch to quickly communicate things monoglots might have to resort to lengthy circumlocution to communicate.

EDIT2: Walkable city! Sweet! I don't know about Houston, but it looks way nicer than what I remember of LA or NYC. Street trees, even.

EDIT3: do I have these prices right? 8,8 CNY ~= 1 CHF? Meanwhile, YouTube is serving me local ads for kitchen knives at 330 CNY!

EDIT4: "Muslim Restaurant" == halal?

EDIT5: final thought: the narrator, like my friend, could almost be from Louisiana, where the three main topics of conversation are: (1) the food you ate last, (2) the food you're going to eat next, and (3) the food you're eating right now.