Cantonese Spoken Here

     The few words of Mandarin that I learned last year when living in Shenzhen aren't very useful for communicating here in Hong Kong.  China has a handful of major dialects.  The dialect spoken in Beijing, Mandarin, is the official dialect of the People's Republic of China.  The official dialect in Hong Kong is Cantonese.
     The British returned the administration of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China 15 years ago in 1997, after its 99-year lease on the Hong Kong New Territories expired.  But even now after the handover, Hong Kong isn't exactly part of China.  It's called a Special Administrative Region of the PRC.  It has a separate government, a separate financial system (Hong Kong Dollars are used here instead of Chinese yuan), a separate legal system ( which affords certain freedoms not found in the PRC, including freedom of speech), and a separate official dialect, what they've traditionally spoken here, Cantonese.  Cantonese is actually spoken in many areas of southern China, including the city of Guangzhou (formerly known in the West as Canton), but the official language anywhere in mainland China is Mandarin.
     Even though people from various parts of China often can't understand each other's spoken dialects, the written language is the same, in theory.  However, Hong Kong uses what are called traditional Chinese characters and the PRC uses simplified characters.  When you walk down the street in Hong Kong and look at the signs, you notice that the Chinese characters have noticeably more brush strokes than the characters you see on signs in mainland China.
     Fortunately for me, English is the other official language in Hong Kong and many people speak English, a remnant of the British presence here for more than 150 years.  However, I've read that more and more Hong Kong schools are de-emphasizing English and instead are requiring students to learn Mandarin.  This reflects the growing amount of travel between Hong Kong and the PRC and the growing interdependence of their economies.
     I've started writing out a little cheat sheet with a few phonetic Cantonese words to carry in my pocket, so I can start practicing some basics like hello, goodbye, thank you and sorry.