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| UTC+8 | This user's time zone is UTC+8 and does not observe Daylight Saving Time. |
Hello I'm Wpi /dʌb piː aɪ/. As a Hong Konger, my main focuses are English-Cantonese loans, Hong Kong Cantonese, and Cantonese in general. I also work on (or is interested in) other contact/mixed languages in East Asia, such as Chinese Coastal Pidgin, Yilan Creole and Singlish, especially on words that have shifted in semantics and/or morphology from the donor language.
See also: /plans
In case anyone wants a more detailed explanation other than Babel:
My English accent is basically Hong Kong English, but I am also able to speak with a somewhat Southeastern England/Transatlantic accent. Unlike most speakers of HKE, my KIT-FLEECE and DRESS-TRAP vowels are not merged, though sometimes I hypercorrect them, such as pronouncing guess as gas. Cetain words do not follow the typical HKE tone pattern, including see (interjection) si2, then den2, and then en6 den2, plus plas6.
Most accents would be easily understood by me, except heavy Indian English and Southern American English. (and I hate the way some accents pronounce the lot, cloth, thought vowels as ɑ)
English is not my native language, so even though the level of understanding is near-native, I would still make mistakes from time to time, especially mixing up words that are spelt similarly and using a few words that are commonly used as direct translations of common Cantonese phrases. Please do bear with them.
I speak Cantonese that is based on Hong Kong Cantonese, but with a weird accent, notably the following:
Also note my Cantonese is heavily filled with code-switching and loans from English, so it would be difficult to understand without understanding both languages. Certain idiolectal words include spag spek6 "spaghetti", fact fek1 "(mathematics) to factorize", fact fek6 "(mathematics) factorial", pert pat6 "percent", 頭𩓥頂 tau4 ok6 deng2 "top of the head" (=頭殼頂), 衫架 "clotheshanger" (=衣架). Idiolectal pronunciations that often persist even in proper speech include 舊陣時 gau6 wan6 si4, 按摩 oi3 mo1, 寵物 cou2 mat6.
For formal Cantonese I generally prefer literary words over Mandarin equivalents, since the latter feels weird when spoken in Cantonese.
My pronunciation is extremely bad, and phonemically there are only two tones: the high tone (=T1 and T4) and the rising tone(=T2 and T3), plus the neutral tone which really shouldn't be counted. Other than that it is what you would expect for a Cantonese speaker to learn Mandarin.
I can read Japanese fine (provided that it does uses kanji for words that are commonly written in kanji), but my writing skills are horrible; speaking and listening is still at beginner level. Also note that my Japanese sounds are often mapped onto their Cantonese equivalents.
If it's a mixed language I usually can guess around 50% of the meaning by knowing one of the parent languages, 80-90% if both. If the language in question has cognates with either English or Cantonese, I will probably be able to understand it, but the cognates must be very obvious.