Teh awesome langkwiz skillz

It would be great if I was from Holland, and I moved to Germany to work. I mean languagewise. I would have to pronounse "lederhosen", or "Er ist ein gefährlicher Panzerkampfwagen" a little differently but otherwise I would be set quite easily.

The actual situation is: I come from Finland and I work in Hong Kong. Sweet in every other way but the language.

So, let's look at the facts:
- Me, a Finnish bloke of 25 years old.
- Speaks and writes rather fluent English
- Speaks and writes rather execrable Swedish
- Speaks and writes even worse German
- Knows elementary Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese)

Cantonese:
- 6 to 7 tones (depending how counted)
- No resemblance to any western languages
- Pronounciation is totally different from that of any western language

So, yeah. I know some languages, I know how they work and I understand a lot of the basics. But Cantonese for some reason is just impossible! I've tried a number of times to systematically start learning the language but always there's something to blast away my motivation.

At the office, I pick up my dictionary. I browse a few pages and pick up a sample sentence:

I say: "Yiu-ng-yiu daai ngawn-chewn-mo aa?"

Heads come up, awkwards stares.

Silence.

One colleague asks, half laughing: "Wha-at?"

I repeat: "Yiu-ng-yiu daai ngawn-chewn-mo aa?"

Colleague: "What are you trying to say?"

Me: "Cantonese for 'do I need a helmet?'"

Then I take the book to my colleague, who studies it for a while. Eyebrows raised, a small smirk.

My colleague then reads it to me but all I hear is Kung-Fu-talk. Does he want to see my fighting skillz? I can judo-chop people. Maybe he wants a fight? I don't know!

I ask to hear it again, slower.

Again I hear Kung-Fu-talk, but it's slower than before. Good, I can pick up a few words that I think I can recognize from the book. Ok, I'm quite sure I can repeat it correctly!

I try my best to say it EXACTLY like I just heard my colleague say it.

"Yiu-ng-yiu daai ngawn-chewn-mo aa?"

...And I'm told I got it all wrong.
...Doesn't even come close.
...I need more practise on the pronunciation and the tones.
WHAT THE F*CK?! I said it the same way I just heard it - and I read it directly from the frigging dictionary! How can it NOT be even close?! How is that supposed to motivate me at all? How I ask you, how?

If I can't even get it right if reading straight from a dictionary, how could I without one? I don't know, it just doesn't motivate me.

I would like to learn the language, no doubt. It would be totally awesome and kick ass to know Cantonese, but damnit, they should give me a break!

Oh, and the above dialogue never happenned actually, but I've had plenty similar ones earlier.

One clear problem with dictionaries is that they get the pronunciation key totally wrong. For examply, they write (a simple, basic word) "I, or me" as "ngaw", while it is actually pronounced simply as "oh"... Why would they put it as "ngaw"? It just screws up everything. And knowing this, I can't really trust anything they wrote there! Damnit!

Aside from all of the above, the whole city of Hong Kong doesn't really motivate me. Everyone speaks quite good english here. Everyone that I need to speak English anyway. From the taxi driver to the nice young girl at McDonald's. Even if I learned Cantonese, I would probably be too chicken-shit to actually speak it - seeing how well I can manage with English.

Oh, and it's really annoying to see 2-year-old children running around, speaking better Cantonese than I do! I'm superior!! And it's not fair!

...

On a side note, it's been fun teaching local people some Finnish, which is equally difficult for them to learn. Ärrän kierrän ympäri orren, ässän pistän taskuun. Mwahahahahaha!!!