akirakurusu

"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?"

Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights on this question? What are the non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon that seemingly makes Japan an outlier?

Been studying standard HK Cantonese for almost 2 years at this point, can understand a wide variety of written Cantonese, news, stories, but cannot even read a basic mandarin sentence I see on wechat. Cantonese having 6 tones (with 9 in some regional variants). There are over 2200 different syllables in Cantonese, more than twice the number in Mandarin: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-languages/Standard-....

I'd argue the majority of daily vocabulary is completely different, both in writing and in pronunciation, than its mandarin counterpart, such as some of the most commonly used words 而家，頭先，邊個，喺唔喺係，佢哋，講，有冇，點解，佢同佢講，畀 as in 我講畀佢聽，聽日，尋日，嗰陣時，嗰個，嗰啲， I could go on and on. Even after all this time, I didn't know the characters 是 or 哪里 until learning them a few weeks ago. Likewise, if I were a native mandarin speaker and heard the relatively simple, common sentence 佢哋而家喺邊度呀 spoken to me, I would understand exactly 0% of it. Grammar is significantly different with word placement, nuance of ending particles, usage of adverbial comparisons using Noun + V + 得 + 過 + Noun, using 畀，未。。。添, etc. I cannot understand a shred of mandarin when spoken to me, despite being able to communicate conversationally and understand most of spoken Cantonese from others. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1211. There are varieties of sources analyzing the etymology of words in sinitic languages as well as their grammar structures and phonologies. Both languages are far from being mutually intelligible for monolingual speakers. Perhaps being a native speaker in both has allowed you to have a comprehensive mental-map of their isomorphisms.

Cantonese - it is an incredibly rich language with tons of regional differences, slang, and history spanning thousands of years, way more rich than modern Mandarin. The fact that it has fewer resources online to learn it has made me more resourceful at finding good books, academic grammar articles, and has gotten me deep into HK pop culture. I'm a native romance language speaker and Cantonese is so fundamentally different in its structure than my language it is a joy to learn. Unfortunately, the CCP is constantly cracking down on the language, with a very political campaign to dismiss it as a "dialect" despite it being mutually unintelligible with Mandarin and having its own independent history.

How is it something only classists can use? I use Airbnb _because_ it is cheap, usually significantly cheaper than hotels when visiting cities. I use it to save money because I am cost conscious. A lot of lower-income friends also use Airbnb because of this very reason. It has been a lifesaver for us.