Made in Macao | The complication of ‘thank you’

Jenny Lao-Phillips

Cantonese is one of the hardest languages to learn because on top of the difficulty of reading Chinese characters, Cantonese speakers have been inventing more colloquial characters since the 17th century. We all know that unlike most languages with alphabets or forms that guide pronunciation, each Chinese character’s pronunciation has no relation to how the character is formed. This is why it takes us Chinese all our lives to be able to recognize only around 5,000 to 8,000 characters (approximately 10-15% of all characters) on average, which is enough to read and write a non-Chinese-scholarly book. Even if one tries to learn Cantonese with romanization, getting the pronunciation right without learning Chinese characters makes this one of the world’s most difficult challenges.

Cantonese consists of nine tones, so a light difference in pronouncing a word could mean something totally different. This makes it not only difficult, but also dangerous to speak Cantonese without enough practice. Especially when Cantonese speakers seem to have been very creative with “swearing,” many words with a slightly different pronunciation can become bad words. For instance, a slight mispronunciation of “I was transferred (at work)” in Cantonese, can mean “I was f—ed.”  Merely counting from one to 10 in Cantonese already includes a couple of bad words. To further complicate the language, we created different ways of saying one thing with slight differences in meaning. I believe the first challenge Cantonese learners may encounter is merely saying “thank you.”

“Thank you” is usually one of the first phrases we learn when we attempt to acquire a new language. Obviously, most of my non-Chinese speaking friends have asked me how to say “thank you” in Cantonese. In most cases, I highly recommend them to learn the Mandarin, “Xie Xie”, which all Cantonese speakers understand. It is also a lot easier to pronounce and remember, and needs less explanation, because in Cantonese we have two ways to say “thank you” and they cannot be used interchangeably.

One term is “Do Ze,” which sounds more similar to the Mandarin term. However, this “thank you” is only used in terms of gratitude. For example, when people give you a gift, pay you a compliment, or do you a favor not of simple service like opening the door for you. When someone holds the door for you, we say “Ng Goi,” which is used when you receive a service from someone. Like when someone offers you a seat on the bus, pulls out your chair for you in a restaurant or serves you a cup of coffee you say “Ng Goi.”

We also need to be careful not to mix up “Do Ze” and “Ng Goi,” because if someone gives you a bunch of roses and you say “Ng Goi” it makes it seem like it is a favor and they are helping you buy the roses rather than you accepting it as a gift with gratitude. On the other hand, if someone serves you a cup of coffee, and you said “Do Ze”, they may misunderstand that you assumed it is a gift and you can take the cup away as a present. Well, I was kidding with this last example, it will just make the service providers feel weird. Of course, Cantonese speakers understand that anyone who uses “Ng Goi” or “Do Ze” in the wrong scenario formally must be a non-native speaker. Native Cantonese speakers also purposely use the two terms interchangeably, but mostly as a joke. This could be an inside joke that is hard to explain. So to prevent confusion, even in Macao as a Cantonese-speaking city, it is always safer to say “Xie Xie.”