This is a post I never thought I would write...

I can speak/read/type (I have awful handwriting) Mandarin to an intermediate level.  

Since moving back to Hong Kong 2 1/2 years ago, my mandarin abilities have rapidly decreased, but they are in there, and get dusted off a few times a week.

Having found myself with some unexpected free time, I decided to take a month of intensive Cantonese classes in November 2013 - 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 4 weeks.

Why?  Well, I live in Hong Kong, and my kids go to local Cantonese school.  It will be good for them to see me studying Cantonese, and it will help me to communicate with the other parents and teachers at the school.

I don't have any expectations that my Cantonese will ever catch up with my Mandarin level.  On the other hand, I perfectly expect to lose one Mandarin word for every Cantonese word I learn!!

Related Links

Hong Kong Language School
Pleco Dictionary App
Cantonese Sheik Forum
Chinese Forums

Two great videos about learning Cantonese by fellow South Lantau resident Cecilie who encourages everyone to "Learn Cantonese The Natural Way – From A Norwegian!"
Cantomania 1
Cantomania 2

I struggle with this every day with my kids.  They have a Chinese dictation every week, although this is in Mandarin it requires the standard traditional HK character set as used by the text books and education department.  

I was using Hanlexon and even paid for their service, but then we discovered a big problem. Some of the characters, due to the Hanlexon font, which is not a standard HK font, were coming out wrong - certain strokes too long or too short or just plain wrong.

My emotions bordered between failure and frustration, this was the ONE thing I could do for my kids to help them with Chinese - create worksheets and practice with them.  And now I can't...

I have written to Hanlexon, and I am investigating other options, but nothing certain has been discovered.  I could list 10 other Chinese worksheet generator sites, but none of them are specific to Hong Kong, so I don't think they resolve the issue.

What I have learned from my own research is this:

For the Mac it is best to use these fonts for Cantonese:

儷黑 Pro and 儷宋 Pro

I am begging the school to provide practice sheets for the students, especially in the lower primary years where it is not easy for students to copy the characters from the book accurately.  

Here are some very visual examples to see - more on the PDF, do look at that.

These two links are really helpful:

http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/en/business/tech_promotion/ccli/hkscs/

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/character_sets.html"

Hong Kong SCS

Except from the website:

"In 1995, the government of Hong Kong created its own extension to Big Five, calling it the Government Common Character Set (GCCS). In 1999, they revised it and renamed it the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS or Hong Kong SCS). It was updated in 2001, 2004, and 2008, for a current total of 4,568 traditional-form hanzi.

Unicode 4.1 (2005) and HKSCS-2004 are fully coordinated, and Unicode 5.2 (2009) and HKSCS-2008 are fully coordinated. Thus, all HKSCS characters map to Unicode characters. HKSCS-2008 is the last version that will be published with Big Five code points.

The Traditional Chinese Input Method in Mac OS X 10.3 and above supports HKSCS-2001 in the fonts LiHei 儷黑 Pro and LiSong 儷宋 Pro.

Charset name: BIG5-HKSCS.

http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/ccli/eng/hkscs/ "

Some other links that go into more detail:

http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/en/business/tech_promotion/ccli/cliac/glyphs_guidelines.htm

http://glyph.iso10646hk.net/english/ginfo.jsp

Pencils. With two kids in primary school, pencils are a quickly disappearing commodity in our house. They need 3-5 sharpened pencils in their pencil case every day.

Natty prefers tic tic pencils, AKA mechanical pencils, while Sassy prefers wooden pencils, but they each use both.

While we love local school, we have no love for local pencils. They always seem to come with broken or crooked leads, splinter upon sharpening and just plain die. So on our annual trip to the USA, I stock up on Ticonderoga pencils, black for Natty and yellow for Sassy (only because they don't make pink).

Sassy loves to use small handheld sharpeners to sharpen her pencils down to one or two inches long before she retires them. Natty rarely uses his, preferring his tic tic. The tic tic pencils here are almost always 0.5 leads, but in the USA they are 0.7 and 0.9. The kids know which pencils take which leads and keep all their leads organized with no help from me. I think the whole mechanical aspect fascinates them, especially Natty.

Another clever USA purchase was a really nice multi-voltage pencil sharpener from Costo, otherwise I would never be able to keep a nice supply of sharpened pencils like in the photo!

School books in Hong Kong are very different than when I grew up in the USA.

In the USA, we had 'text books' these were owned by the school, and every year we would get this large heavy hard cover text books, one for each subject.  We would bring them home and cover them in paper to protect them - in our case often brown paper grocery bags - and return them at the end of the year.  Of course, we were not supposed to write in them, but one of the first things we would do every year, was see if there were any notes or names from whomever had the book the year before!

In Hong Kong, we get a long list of books, often 5 or more per subject for each term.  This includes text books, work books and maybe a special book like grammar or similar/  The books are thin paper back books, A4 size, and are used by one student, for one term only.  

The positive of this method, is text books are updated regularly.  The negative is that it is very confusing as to which books to take on which days, and of course we have to recycle the books.  

The photo on the this page is just Natty's books for one semester!  Sassy has a similar size stack, and they will get them again next semester.  They don't need to bring every book, every day - just for the classes they have that day.  But even with that, their bags are heavy so we bought them wheeled bags.  

We are given an order sheet from the school. we return it with a check, and the books are delivered to the school before the semester starts.  If we miss the order, we can get them straight from the incredibly chaotic text book shop in Yuen Long - this job has been exclusively outsourced to my hubby.  Same goes for uniforms - we can order and collect them through the school or at the special uniform shop in Mongkok.

The books cost about 1500 HKD (190 USD) per semester for each kid.  Uniforms cost about the same, because we buy 3x of each so we don't run out through the week (one to wear, one to wash, one to dry).  I always buy them a bit large so they last two years.  These are the only costs we have for the school year, so we are fine with it.  

For families that cannot afford the books and uniforms there are government subsidies for which they can apply.  The schools also collect uniforms to redistribute to those in need.  

Hong Kong public schools are excellent, free, and with very minimal additional expenses - books and uniforms, and sometimes an air conditioning fee of 100 HKD (13 USD) per semester.  Extra curricular activities and field trips are heavily subsidized and either free or very cheap.  We really cannot complain about the cost-benefit ratio!

Many local kindergartens are part of the 'voucher' scheme which gives HK residents a large discount on kindergarten fees.  With the voucher, half day classes are usually 'free' and full day come in at under 1000 HKD a month.  But it does vary per school.
More details: http://www.edb.gov.hk/en/edu-system/preprimary-kindergarten/preprimary-voucher/index.html

And when you search for a kindy here: http://www.chsc.hk/kindergarten/index_en.html you can easily see which kindergartens are part of the voucher scheme.

The next obvious question, is how to find a local kindy. There is no secret trick, you have to look through the list of kindergartens in your district, look at the descriptions of each school, come up with a shortlist of those that interest you, then start calling/emailing/visiting until you find one that suits you and has space.  

Only *after* doing that step one (making a shortlist), then start talking to other parents in your district and getting their opinions.  Because, at end of the day, it does no good if the parents all direct you to a school that is either full or does not meet your needs or is too far from your house - so having your own shortlist first often helps.  Plus you can always add another school to your list.

It will also make your conversation with other parents go better, as you will already be a bit more aware of the schools and locations and have good questions to ask them, and as a result leave the conversation much more informed.

Kindergartens in Hong Kong offer morning class, afternoon class, whole day class or some combination of the three.  Some are religious, a great many are christian, some are not, many are bilingual, many are Cantonese only.  I would go so far as to say that all offer a loving and caring environment for children.

Just remember, not every kindergarten is for every family.  With all the variety in Hong Kong, you are sure to find one that suits you, in your district.  

Related Links
http://www.topschools.hk/admission-arrangements-for-k1-places-in-kindergartens-for-201516/

NCS.  Non Cantonese Speaking students - this is an important TLA to know.  If your child is already of primary school age and you want/need to go to a local Cantonese medium primary school - you can, but you will have to spend time searching for the appropriate welcoming school that meets your educational philosophy and goals.

There are two basic approaches to this:

1. At a Designated School for Non-Native Speakers
These are special Cantonese medium schools that have a high percentage of non-native Cantonese speakers. You can find a list of these on the gov website pages. 
These schools each have their own methods of getting newcomers up to speed and will accept older primary year students as long as they have the space. Some will put the older kids down a level or two until they catch up, others will provide extra lessons, some will use a combination.
I saw a school like this take a P5 student, who had little English and no Cantonese and get her to a very decent level of spoken fluency in both within 2 years.

2. At regular Cantonese primary schools that use the standard HK curriculum.
Some schools are more welcoming to foreign students than others, some schools have experience with students arriving with no Cantonese and pride themselves in being able to get them up to speed so they can fully integrate with the local level students.
I have seen a school that has about 10% foreign students, some of which arrived with no cantonese, and this school likes to pull them out of certain lessons and give them small group tutorial during Chinese and math to help them, as well as allow them to use the English version of the General Studies book (sometimes along side the Chinese version) and will sometimes offer bilingual test papers/homework - but it varies and is up to how you want to do it too (this or full immersion). They might also provide after school tutorials or other assistance.
I saw a school like this pride themselves in the students they did this with! They gave me four examples, and of those four I met two of the families, super results!

I also want to add, that many (but not all) of the Designated Schools for Non-Native Cantonese Speakers follow an 'adjusted' curriculum that is not as strict or intense as a standard local school, and with the majority of the students being non-native speakers, the playground language is often not Cantonese. Many of these students either go to a similar secondary school or an English medium secondary school. Some would have trouble going on to a Cantonese medium secondary school. 

Other NCS schools have a 'two stream' approach' whereby one stream studies identical curriculum to standard Cantonese medium schools, and the other stream uses more English and has a gentler Cantonese curriculum.

So it really depends on your academic goals and your education philosophy - i.e. gentle bilingual approach or full immersion approach, to get by in Cantonese conversation, or to be able to be fully literate in written Chinese. 

Related Links

You can read more about NCS students and schools from the EDB Website 

In May 2013, the HK Standard newspaper interviewed me and other NCS parents in this article, and school principals in this article.

Three different views on NCS schools in HK:
Caught Between Hong Kong's Two Systems
Tearing Down the Walls of Segregation
Racism in the Classroom

Recent news in HK:
Court Action against Racially Segregated Schools (SCMP, use Chrome, right click link and choose 'Open in Incognito Window)
From July 2013, a change of thought in the EDB's treatment of NCS students.

Photo: Sassy with some of her friends at primary school