I dated a girl from Hong Kong for 4 years and lived with her and her family for a while. Some people are really good at English there but I want to say around half of the young people(18-35 years old) you meet will be able to hold a understandable conversation in English whereas only 1/50 for the older generation (above 40) would be able to. And when I lived with my ex girlfriend with her family, her brother couldn't speak English but her sister was able to, and her parents didn't have any English knowledge at all, so Cantonese was important for me to learn as well back then.
But since I have some Chinese people in my family and they just speak Mandarin only, Mandarin is more important for me at the moment lol.
I know your post is from 2012 though, so 3 years later did you learn Cantonese in the meantime?
Posted on: When are you Coming to Hong Kong?
July 13, 2015 at 7:54 PMI dated a girl from Hong Kong for 4 years and lived with her and her family for a while. Some people are really good at English there but I want to say around half of the young people(18-35 years old) you meet will be able to hold a understandable conversation in English whereas only 1/50 for the older generation (above 40) would be able to. And when I lived with my ex girlfriend with her family, her brother couldn't speak English but her sister was able to, and her parents didn't have any English knowledge at all, so Cantonese was important for me to learn as well back then.
But since I have some Chinese people in my family and they just speak Mandarin only, Mandarin is more important for me at the moment lol.
I know your post is from 2012 though, so 3 years later did you learn Cantonese in the meantime?
^_^, happy wishes