Taming Babel

This is book number four in the Hong Kong Children's book series: Taming Babel

Tailor-made for young readers at ages 8 - 12 in Hong Kong and beyond, the Hong Kong Children’s Stories series is a collection of six English stories written with the local Hong Kong context in mind. Ideal for language learning, leisure and reading aloud among Hong Kong readers young and old, the book series will bring together original short stories and pictures about various aspects of Hong Kong's everyday life:

Book 1: Culinary Charades, which is about Hong Kong food

Book 2: The Summer of 1997, which is about walking down memory lane in Hong Kong

Book 3: Unforgettable Neighbours, which is about animals in Hong Kong

Book 4: Taming Babel, which is about the Cantonese language

Book 5: Herstory, which is about Hong Kong women

Book 6: A Tale of Two Haunted Universities, which is about Hong Kong women

Learn Cantonese the fast and easy way with this book! People keep saying learning Cantonese is hard, and to speak proficient Cantonese like Hong Kongers is to sing songs with its nine-tone system. While it is stunningly entertaining to witness how a melodic text such as ‘yü yü yü, yü yü yü, yü yü yü, yü yü yü, yü yü yü.’ can carry the grammatically flawless and romantic content of ‘You and I, met in the rain, you said to me, “while it’s still raining, come to my place. I’ll bring you comfort.”’, one tiny mistroke in the language tone can turn the lexical meaning of ‘a computer’ into ‘an idiot’. But perhaps learning Cantonese is not as challenging as it sounds? In Taming Babel, expatriates and foreigners who study, work and live in Hong Kong, share with you useful tips and tricks you do not know when learning Cantonese.