Quest to learn Chinese

From the time I came to Malaysia being a person who likes to learn languages I always wanted to learn the languages those were spoken here, namely Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil language. Though I can understand Tamil language for some time, I learnt speaking it after joining my first job in Malaysia thanks to all my Tamil speaking colleagues from India for bearing me with my broken Tamil. Though I learnt speaking from them I actually polished it by listening to THR Raga a Tamil radio FM channel. Here I should say thanks to my wife (she is a Malaysian by the way) who always listens to it.

Malay being the widely spoken language here in Malaysia my 10 years of stay here has taught me to speak. I found it very easy to learn due to its similarities with Indian origin languages.

Here comes the most difficult part, learning Chinese. My first hurdle was which one to learn as china also has many languages like India. After speaking to most of my Chinese friends, I was stuck between either to learn Mandarin or Cantonese. Most of my Chinese friends advised me to learn Mandarin but when ask them what is the most spoken language in KL they all agreed on Cantonese.

Few motivations to learn Chinese:

I always wonder what is that my Chinese friends were talking about?

To build a good impression with my clients as most of them are Chinese.

How to place my order with a Chinese hawker uncle who can only speak Chinese?

Last but not least, add to my list of languages:

1. Telugu
2. Hindi
3. Tamil
4. English
5. Malay
6. Cantonese

So I Decided to learn Cantonese as all my friends are from KL and all of them can speak Cantonese.  I have been trying to find a place to start learning it (Listening and learning from people or from FM radio is certainly not an option for Chinese as I could not get grasp of the intonation, neither I have the luxury of time to go to classes to learn).  During my quest to find a proper channel to start my learning process I found this (thanks to Google)LearnChineseEZ (http://www.learnchineseez.com/lessons/cantonese/) online Chinese teaching portal. Though I just started, it looks promising with it’s easy to follow lessons with audio links to get hold of intonations. Hope soon I can start understanding what people are talking aboutJ.