The University of Edinburgh
Year of Presentation: 2007
Dissertation
Analyzing Hong Kong English in
Computer-mediated Communication:
texts from Blogging
King-man Judy Tam (s0678019)
MSc in English Language
The University of Edinburgh
Year of Presentation 2007
Abstract:
This paper examines the linguistic features in blogging (a kind of text-based
computer-mediated communication (CMC)) written by Hong Kong people. There are two
parts of analysis concerning the notion of Hong Kong English (HKE). Part 1 is based on a
collection of 1413 online personal journals in blogging written by 20 Hong Kong
adolescents. The use of English is revealed with respect to the overall language distribution
in blogging. It is found that the bloggers have followed the language trend in Hong Kong
and have used code-switching most frequently. Part 2 is based on a corpus of 15,892-word
English online personal journals, collected selectively from the samples in Part 1. Some
specific features of Hong Kong English are identified, which include the topicalisation of
other categories rather than subjects; omitting the inflection and overgeneralizing some
inflection markings; and using CMC features such as creative Romanised Cantonese and
direct transliteration. Having compared those features in blogging with those in two other
genres including online instant messaging and daily conversations, it is suggested that some
distinct structures of Hong Kong English are used intentionally for functional reasons in the
context of blogging. And, Hong Kong people actually have the ability to vary the selection
of certain HKE features according to the communicative purposes across different genres.
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Claire Cowie for
her inspiration, continual support and guidance throughout the research and writing
process. Great appreciation is also extended to the PHD student Mr. Vinton Poon for
his time and advice given in discussing the issues of Hong Kong English.
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Contents:
Acknowledgement
1
Contents
2
Chapter 1 Introduction
4
Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Languages in Hong Kong
2.2 The notion of Hong Kong English
7
7
11
2.2.1 Common Hong Kong English features
2.3 English and Computer-mediated Communication in Hong Kong
2.3.1 CMCHKE features
12
14
15
2.4 Blogging and its Languages
2.4.1 In the Hong Kong context: Blogging and its Languages
16
17
Chapter 3 Methodology
3.1 Textual Data
3.1.1 A corpus of personal online journals from blogging
3.1.2 A corpus of English texts from blogging
19
19
19
21
3.2 The Participants
3.3 Supplementary Data
3.3.1 Online instant messaging
3.3.2 Taped casual conversations
3.4 Data Analysis
23
25
25
25
25
Chapter 4 Results and Discussions (Part 1) – Language Distribution
in blogging
4.1 Language use in blogging by Hong Kong people
28
4.1.1 Language distributions in blogging
4.1.2 A comparison with other genres
4.2 The usage of English in Xanga
4.2.1 Pure English entries in blogging
4.2.2 English in code-switching entries
4.3 HKE in blogging
4.4 CMCHKE in blogging
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30
34
35
37
41
42
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Chapter 5 Results and Discussions (Part 2) – Features of Hong
43
Kong English in blogging
5.1 Topicalisation
5.1.1 Verb Topicalisation with subject omission
5.1.2 Circumstances topicalisations
5.1.3 Other topicalisations involving the omission of ‘it’
5.1.4 Verbal noun phrase Topicalisation
5.1.5 Overemphasizing the topic
5.1.6 Object topicalisation
5.2 Morphosyntax for verb
5.2.1 The distribution of base form
43
45
48
51
52
53
53
54
58
5.2.2 Fronting a sentence with a verb inflected by -ing
5.2.3 Overuse of perfect form
5.3 HKECMC features
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60
60
5.3.1 End of sentence Particles
5.3.2 Romanized Cantonese
5.3.3 Literal translation of Cantonese to English
5.4. A comparison with other informal text types in Hong Kong
5.4.1 Variations of topicalisation in the informal contexts
5.4.2 Variations of morphosyntax for verbs in the informal contexts
5.4.3 Variations of CMCHKE features in the informal contexts
61
64
65
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67
69
70
5.4.4. Limitations of the Comparison
71
Chapter 6 Conclusion
73
References
75
Appendices
Appendix 1 – A tagged corpus of English entries: data from blogging
Appendix 2 – Dialogues of online instant messaging: data from MSN
79
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97
Messenger
Appendix 3 – Data from casual conversations
Appendix 4a – A sample text of Pure English entry from blogging
Appendix 4b – A sample text of English-dominant code-switching entry
from blogging
Appendix 4c – A sample text of Cantonese-dominant code-switching
entry from blogging
Appendix 4d – A sample text of Pure Cantonese entry form blogging
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Chapter 1 Introduction
The recognition of English in Hong Kong as a variety is controversial. On the one
hand, some formal properties of Hong Kong English including phonology, syntax,
lexis and grammar have been documented in the volume Hong Kong English:
Autonomy and creativity (Bolton, ed., 2002b). On the other hand, Hong Kong people
have a strong desire to follow the external norm of Standard varieties such as British
English (BrE) and American English (AmE); thus they have not accepted the
existence of the local variety. Traditionally, Hong Kong people would identify ‘Hong
Kong English’ as ‘bad English’, but not an English variety of their own.
Despite the debates on the notion of Hong Kong English (HKE) in the field of
sociolinguistics, Hong Kong adolescents are gradually forming an English-speaking
community on the internet. Emails and online instant messaging, which are two very
popular types of Computer-mediated Communication (CMC), have been providing
for Hong Kong people to exchange information with each other in written form of
English. Also, new forms of the relevant features such as Romanized Cantonese have
been discovered in the English written by Hong Kong ‘Netspeakers’ in those CMC
genres (CMCHKE). Recently Hong Kong people have been performing their variety
of written English in blogging, a free-prose-like CMC text type which lacks
spontaneous interactiveness but includes an element of reflective and opinionated
writing (Crystal, 2006). This current research sets out to examine the English used in
the blogging produced by Hong Kong people. The aims of this study are (i) to identify
some of the distinct structural features of HKE and CMCHKE in personal blogs
written by Hong Kong adolescents, and (ii) to discuss those features with reference to
the linguistic influence of contact language, the discourse, and other sociological
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factors. Two key research questions are:
i.
ii.
What are the distinctive structural features of Hong Kong English in
personal blogs written by Hong Kong adolescents?
As long as blogging is such a hybrid genre, how do those bloggers pattern
the features of Hong Kong English with reference to the discourse and
the sociolinguistic background?
Furthermore, there are three reasons why blogging is chosen as a subject of study
regarding HKE in this paper. First, blogging is gaining its popularity worldwide; but
among all the literature the researcher has come across, none of them mention Hong
Kong English in blogging. Second, since most Hong Kong youngsters do not have a
writing habit, blogging is likely to be the most frequent writing practice in Hong
Kong other than workplace and academic writing. It is interesting to look at the
distinct features of HKE in such an informal context. Finally, as blogging is a genre
resembling off-line antecedents and sharing features with personal web pages and
online discussion forums, this attracts the writer’s attention to the use of HKE in such
a hybrid genre.
To examine the variations of English in blogs written by Hong Kong people, this
study is divided into two parts. Part 1 is based on a collection of 1413 online personal
journals in blogging written by 20 Hong Kong adolescents. The use of English is
revealed, both quantitatively and qualitatively, with respect to the overall language
distribution in blogging. The discussions involve the notion of code-switching in
Hong Kong. Part 2 is based on a corpus of 15,892-word English online personal
journals, collected selectively from the samples in Part 1. Particularly, the analysis
covers qualitative descriptions of topicalisation, morphosyntax and the HKECMC
features from the data of blogging. The distributions of the variables are explained
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Year of Presentation: 2007
with reference to native-speaker varieties (Standard English), Cantonese (the contact
language), and the contextual factors including functional issues and sociolinguistic
background in Hong Kong. Additionally, this paper also displays a brief account on
the differences in the usage of Hong Kong English between blogging and another two
genres (daily conversations and instant online messaging).
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Languages in Hong Kong
For many years, Hong Kong people have performed their complex linguistic
repertoire. Cantonese is always the primary language spoken by the local people.
English has come to Hong Kong since it was conquered by the British in the late
nineteenth century. According to Pennington (1998), Hone Kong has then become an
expected diglossic1 community under the British colonialism, with English serving as
the ‘high’ or prestige language in the government administration and in any legal
matters and with Cantonese being the ‘low’ or vernacular language of everyday affairs.
However, Pennington (1998) continues to report that since Cantonese has been
recognized as an official language by the British government since 1974, it has
increasingly infiltrated the domains formerly reserved for English. In the next two
decades since then, English and Cantonese were increasingly complex coexistence in
government, law, education, and business. In 1997, after the end of the colonial period,
Hong Kong has become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC). The compact relationship with Mainland China has
increased the accessibility of Putonghua (the standard spoken Mandarin) in both
business and entertainment sectors. To match up new diglossic change with the
suitable local language policies, Putonghua has been introduced into the school
curriculum under the education reforms of liangwen-sanyu (the two written codes and
the three spoken languages) (So, 1998). This develops “a new trilingual profile in the
community” (Pennington, 1998:2).
1
Diglossia refers to the existence of two languages (or varieties of one language) in one society, each
of which performs different communicative functions in different social domains (Fishman, 1967).
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Indeed, there is a certain degree of multilingualism in Hong Kong. However, unlike
the situation in other multilingual Asian cities such as Singapore, the opportunity and
need of the majority of the Hong Kong people to use spoken English to communicate
are not socially extensive. First, according to the 2006 Population By-Census, 95% of
the population in Hong Kong are Chinese (The Government of the Hong Kong
Administrative Region, 2007) and almost all of them speak Cantonese as their mother
tongue among the local communication. Second, Luke and Richards (1982) have
observe that there is a relatively high degree of social distance between the dominant
Chinese community and the English-speaking expatriate minority group. Eventually,
the Chinese Cantonese-speakers are kept away from the language and culture of the
other party. Third, in Hong Kong the social norms are against using English for
intraethnic communication. Li (1996) reports Kwok and Chan’s survey on
code-choice of university students; it is found that bilingual speakers would prefer to
use English only in situations where they have little choice. Outside the classrooms,
the eager student who dares to initiate a conversation with peers in English will be
considered as a freak or a show-off. Also, there is very little support to provide
authentic situations in which people use English for real communicative purposes
outside classrooms.
Although English comes last in terms of priority on the language usage list for
intraethnic oral communication, English is functionally important in Hong Kong.
There is always a societal support for English. Hong Kong is an international centre
of trade, finance and communications. Many regional headquarters of multinational
corporations in Hong Kong conduct their day-to-day operations in English. English
has been viewed as the greatest assets to one’s career prospect. To cater such needs in
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the workplace, English becomes manifest in the education system. In Hong Kong,
English, not Chinese is the main medium of instruction at tertiary (So, 1989). At
secondary level, most students have to take two public examinations during their
school life, and a guaranteed proficiency of English reflected from the exams is a key
criterion of successful application to university. English has its significant value in
Hong Kong. This is further evident that parents have been vigorously expressing their
negative opinions on the education reform of using Cantonese (Chinese) as the
medium of instruction at secondary level since Hong Kong has returned to China,
during and after public debates and demonstrations during the consultation period.
Overall, written English has been frequently adopted in government administration,
the law, the workplace and the schools. For oral communication in those contexts,
Hong Kong people would prefer using their mother tongue. Besides, in recent years
English seems to have intruded into two societal domains of informal intraethnic
communication in the unexpected ways. First, Hong Kong’s pleasant socio-economic
situation and rather high standard of living have led to the employment of a large
number of domestic helpers. Many local families employ Filipino maids with an
additional function of enhancing the English environment for their children. For Hong
Kong people, English is also the main choice of communicating with those domestic
helpers. Afendras (1998) reports in his survey that even where Cantonese is the
mealtime language, half of the children interact in English with the Filipino maids,
and of the rest, one in three report mixed usage with English. Second, due to the
explosion in popularity of Internet communication among the Hong Kong youngsters,
English has a significant profile of usage in online intraethnic communication. For
example, particularly among Hong Kong university students, the language of ICQ (a
software for online chat) is often English, sometimes of a distinctly code-mixed and
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hybrid variety, along with Cantonese (Bolton, 2002).
In contrast, according to Pennington (1994), in intraethnic communication Cantonese
and a variety of mixed codes in which English subject matter lexis being inserted into
a Cantonese utterance frame are more convenient and politically correct mediums for
the majority. Li (1996) summarizes the previous research on Cantonese-English
code-switching in Hong Kong. The summary indicates that code-switching is a typical
language convention in the society and it tends to be intra-sentential. The majority of
Hongkongers just follow the social norms which disapprove against the exclusive use
of English among the local people; and thus switching which involves linguistic units
above the clausal level is rare. According to Gibbons (1987), the English elements
found in Cantonese-English code-mixing in conversations among Hong Kong people
are mostly of one or two words in length, surrounded by Cantonese, and are usually
“content” or “open class” rather than “structure” or “closed class” words. The items
are mostly English nouns, verbs and adjectives, with the occasional adverb. And,
many researchers take the term “code-mixing” as covering such intrasentential
language alternations between English and Cantonese among Hong Kong people. (1)
and (2) are examples of Cantonese-English code-mixing commonly spoken by the
bilinguals in Hong Kong.
(1)
“go
go
lecturer
seung
tohng
prepare
dak
mh
hou
DET CL lecturer attend lessons prepare COMP NEG good
That lecturer doesn’t prepare well for his lessons.”
(Chan, 1993:36)
(2)
“go fehn geun
hou simple
DET CL paper very simple
That exam paper is very simple.”
(Chan, 1993:38)
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Li (2002) has also reviewed four motivations for the overt code-switching behaviour
among Hong Kong people. They include




euphemism: English words would be preferred to replace its
Chinese/Cantonese equivalents;
Specificity: an English expression is preferred when it is more general or
specific compared with its near-synonymous counterparts;
Bilingual punning: When there is similarity in pronunciation between the
English and Cantonese elements; the English word may be embedded in a
Cantonese clause featuring a bilingual pun and double meaning; and
Principle of economy: an English expression may be preferred because it is
shorter and more concise than its Chinese/Cantonese equivalent.
Based on the above review, Li suggests that linguistically inserting English words and
phrases at the intrasentential level could be used to fulfill communicative purposes.
2.2 The notion of Hong Kong English
From the sociolinguistic point of view, the notion of World Englishes explores the
ideas that “English is now so widely established that it can no longer be thought of as
“owned” by any single nation” (Crystal, 1997:26). Different varieties of English,
which are used by the local people in individual regions, are coming up against the
Standard English spoken by native speakers in Kachru’s Inner Circle. This paper is
mainly concerned with a single variety of English used by the non-native speakers
(Hong Kong English). McArthur (2003) notes two distinct categories of recognizing a
variety. By localization, a language variety develops its own characteristics in such
aspects as phonology, syntax, lexis and grammar. By indigenization, the local people
have accepted the existence of a local variety of a language in wide use in day-to-day
communication. Concerning these conditions, however, Pang (2003) observes that the
existence of this local variety has not been accepted in the territory as he claims that
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‘Hong Kong English’ is localized but not (yet) indigenized.
The recognition of ‘Hong Kong English’ as a variety is controversial in the field. On
the one hand, HKE is localized as HKE has its own documented features in
phonology, syntax, lexis and grammar, as in the descriptions in Hong Kong English:
Autonomy and creativity (Bolton, ed., 2002b). Also, Bolton (2002) claims that English
spoken in Hong Kong fulfils Bulter’s five criteria of defining a variety of world
English, as it has its own accents, vocabulary, history, literary creativity and reference
works. On the other hand, HKE is not yet indigenized. In Hong Kong, the norm or
standard of English is an external one - “exonormative” (Bolton, 2002). Joseph (2004)
also points out that Hong Kong people would identify ‘Hong Kong English’ as ‘bad
English’ (Joseph, 2004:139).
The purpose of this current research is not to widen the debate discussed above, but to
provide more theoretical information about the linguistic structures of the English
used by Hong Kong people. Therefore, some common HKE features identified in the
previous research are summarized below for reference.
2.2.1 Common Hong Kong English features
Hung (2002) shows the influence of Cantonese on HKE and describes the
‘phonology’ of HKE by presenting the following phonemic system of HKE.
Chart 1: HKE vowels (Hung, 2002:138)






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Year of Presentation: 2007
Chart 2: HKE consonants (Hung, 2002:139)
Bilabial
Stop
LabioDental
InterDental
pb
Alveolar
Palatal
td
Velar
Labio-Velar
Glottal
kg
 
Affricate
Fricative
f
Lateral
Approximant

s

l
Approximant
Nasal
PalatoAlveolar
r
m
n
j
w

h
Gisborne (2002) presents the major features of variation in relative clauses in Hong
Kong English and illustrates them with reference to the data in the International
Corpus of English. On the one hand, he claims that some particular unique features of
HKE are influenced by Cantonese. For example, a reduced relative construction has a
redundant subject relative pronoun added, as in (3). Since there is a lack of
postpositive modification in Cantonese, Hong Kong people may disallow the N+Adj
pattern of post-modification in HKE. Another example is using ‘where’ with abstract
head nominal in HKE, as in (4). The use of ‘where’ has been extended from replacing
a locative prepositional phrase to replacing a directional prepositional phrase. On the
other hand, Gisborne reports that some features are actually universal
in
learner-varieties of other languages, for example, the omission of prepositions before
the relative pronouns and resumptive pronouns.
(3) This is the student who admitted last year. (Gisborne, 2002:146)
(4) That was the accident which she was hurt. (Gisborne, 2002:148)
Gisborne (2002) continues to give some examples of violations to the morphosyntax
in the native varieties of English, as in (5) and (6). He claims that the Hong Kong
speakers have simplified the native system and have flattened the contrast in tense,
person and number, in which inflection is obligatory. The simplification may suggest
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that Hong Kong English can be represented as an interlanguage continuum.
(5) She like to go there. (Gisborne, 2002:155)
(6) China want to took…wants to take over (Gisborne, 2002:156)
Joseph (2004) points out that some Hong Kong people just blurred the syntactic
differences between Cantonese and English. For example, university graduates in
Hong Kong have been astonished to learn the plural inflection in some count nouns,
such as ‘noodles’. This flattens the distinctiveness between count nouns and mass
nouns. He then refers such a Hong Kong English marker as a result being influenced
by the Cantonese classifiers. For example, in Cantonese, ‘noodles’ and ‘rice’ share the
same classifier. And speakers would expect the same behavior of expressing the
plurality of both nouns, as in (7) and (8).
(7) a bowl of rice (Joseph, 2004: 145)
(8) a bowl of noodle (Joseph, 2004: 145)
In addition, Benson (2002) has identified some distinctive vocabulary of HKE in
terms of the pragmatic and sociocultural factors. For example, ‘unlicensed massage
parlous’, ‘fishball stalls’ and ‘outcall services’ are some informal descriptions of the
Hong Kong commercial sex industry.
2.3 English and Computer-mediated Communication in Hong Kong
Along with the intensive use of the Internet in the twenty-first century, language use
in Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) has gained massive attention. Crystal
(2006) analyzes six common Internet situations: email, chatgroups, virtual worlds,
World Wide Web, instant messaging and blogging; and defines such mediums of
‘Netspeak’ as a language variety which displays features that are unique to the
Internet with variations along the continuum between tradition writing and speaking.
Since the CMC texts are typed in lines and read by the receivers, any spoken features
are significant in those genres. Werry (1996) reported some distinct features of
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conversational sequences in Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a type of online instant
messaging. Example, language on IRC tends to be heavily abbreviated and so explicit
pronominal reference can be deleted. This is especially true for the first person
singular pronoun ‘I’. Also, an innovative set of linguistic devices or orthographic
strategies such as emotion icons are invented to compensate for the lack of intonation
and paralinguistic cues. Capitalization, spelling and punctuation are used to create the
effects of voice, gesture and tone. Nowadays, it is not surprised to find those distinct
linguistic features spreading from the most speech-like instant messaging to the least
speech-like web pages in the CMC settings.
2.3.1 CMCHKE features
Graddol (2006) observes that although English is still the global language on the
Internet, its dominance has been threatened by the first languages of users. The case in
Hong Kong could be an illustration of Graddol’s point. In Hong Kong, the use of
English spreads from workplace to personal communication on the Internet. One
example is the explosion in popularity of online instant messaging among young
people. Bolton (2002) mentions that this communication tool provides an informal
and relaxing context for users to express the linguistic creativity of HKE, noticeably
with the strong influence of Cantonese. Lee (2002) identifies some marked features of
HKE in emails and online instant messaging settings:



Romanized Cantonese: Cantonese expressions are phonologically translated
into Romanised spellings to replace character representations, for example,
bai lin (Cantonese baai3 nin4 meaning relatives visiting during Chinese
New Year). (Lee, 2002:16)
Literal translation of Cantonese to English: Expressions result from direct
translation of Cantonese elements into English in a syllable-by-syllable
manner (or morpheme for morpheme), for example, add oil (Cantonese
gaa1 jau2 meaning working hard as an encouragement, with the morpheme
gaa1 meaning “add” and the morpheme jau2 meaning “oil”). (Lee,
2002:17)
Cantonese particles: A kind of Romanized form which normally appears at
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the end of a sentence. For example, la emphasizes an assertion in Cantonese
and ne expresses ‘what about’ in a question.
These features have led to a new area of discussion on HKE. Despite the
exo-normative standard, Poon (2005) reports that Hong Kong people can recognize
the features of HKE in CMC (CHKE) as properties produced by Hong Kong people.
CMCHKE are strongly linked to the identity of “Hongkong-ness”. CMCHKE features
are widely used in CMC settings. Applying the model of non-native English derived
by Kachru (1992) in the setting, the recognition of CHKE by Hong Kong people may
imply that HKE is moving away from the non-recognition stage and may eventually
positively affect the attitudes towards other forms of HKE. This encourages further
research on HKE in CMC.
2.4 Blogging and its Languages
Along with the attention to the language use in CMC, blogging 2 is gaining its
popularity worldwide and it is one of the hot issues in the Journal of
Computer-mediated Communication (JCMC). According to the research done by
Herring, Scheidt, Bonus and Wright (2004), personal journal3 is the overwhelmingly
prototypical blog type in the blogging community in which bloggers report on their
lives and inner thoughts and feelings. They describe such weblogs as a hybrid of
existing genres, sharing features with off-line antecedents and digital genres including
personal home pages and asynchronous discussion forums. This paper is mainly
concerned with this type of genre produced by the non-native speakers in Hong Kong.
2
Blogs are frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological
sequence.
3
Personal blogs are individualistic intimate forms of self-expression with limited interactivity through
guest book or comment links.
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Crystal (2006) comments that personal blogs consist of both spoken and written
features, as in the summary in Table 1. Also, he claims that it is a discourse seeming
to display written language in its most naked form as the elimination of the
copy-editing procedures makes it departs from the standards.
Table 1. Spoken and Written language features applied to Netspeak in blogging
(Crystal, 2006)
Spoken language criteria
Written language criteria
(Crystal, 2006:45)
(Crystal, 2005:47)
1. time-boung
no
1. space-bound
Yes
2. spontaneous
Yes, but
2. contrived
Variable
with
restrictions
3. face-to-face
No
3. visually decontextualized Yes
4. loosely structured Yes
4. elaborately structured
Variable
5. socially
interactive
6. immediately
revisable
Prosodically rich
No, with
increasing
options
no
5. factually communicative
Yes
6. repeatedly revisable
Variable
No
Graphically rich
No, with
increasing
options
2.4.1 In the Hong Kong context: Blogging and its Languages
Hong Kong youngsters also share the same worldwide CMC-mania and write diaries
and stories on their blogs daily. From the writer’s own experience, many bloggers in
Hong Kong have chosen to use English to write their daily journals, along with
Chinese (Cantonese) and Cantonese-English code-switching. But one interesting
phenomenon is that quite a large number of the Hong Kong bloggers write naked
forms of English to narrate their stories and express their thoughts and opinions.
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Blogging provides a space for youngsters in Hong Kong to perform language practice
other than academic and business writings. In such an informal context, Hong Kong
bloggers seem to be more relaxed about the use of HKE. Many typical HKE features
can be observed extensively in blogging. Besides, Hong Kong bloggers also use a lot
of CMC linguistic features mentioned above, such as emotional icons, Romanized
Cantonese and abbreviations.
Moreover, even though blogging is budding in Hong Kong, not many studies have
been conducted particularly regarding the notion of Hong Kong English. The
proposed research in this paper would bridge the gap by looking into how this kind of
written form of English are produced in CMC and how such a genre which represents
narration and self-expression but lacks copy-editing procedures exhibits the distinct
linguistic features of HKE.
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Chapter 3 Methodology
There are two main parts in this research. The first part is to sketch and quantify the
use of English with reference to the overall language distribution in blogging written
by Hong Kong adolescents. The second part of the research describes some specific
linguistic features of Hong Kong English in blogging. Both parts of examinations are
referring to a corpus of blog entries collected by the writer, and then different sets of
data are selected in presenting the analysis with different purposes mentioned above.
Also, as in the present research blogger’s identity is considered as a key contextual
factor of discussing structural and functional properties of the blogs, demographic
information is coded particularly in this section and along the discussions. In addition,
this research would further explore the features of Hong Kong English in blogging by
making a comparison of between CMC Hong Kong English and spoken Hong Kong
English; English samples from other genres of online and verbal communications will
be collected as a supplement to the core data.
3.1 Textual Data
3.1.1 A corpus of personal online journals from blogging
The present study is to collect my own corpus of data from a weblog hosted by Xanga
- a website based in the USA. Although, it is not specifically designed for Hong Kong
people, Xanga is selected as the data source because it has proceeded with a high
popularity among Hong Kong youngsters with its fashionable functions. The writer
has approached 20 bilingual bloggers from Hong Kong in her own social network. A
total of 1413 entries of online personal journals are collected from the 20 blogs of
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Xanga between January and May of 2007. The purpose of all the entries is personal
journal and this is a key criterion for defining the genre in this study. The bloggers
ware free to use any languages in the collected Xanga weblogs and genarally three
forms are used by the bloggers to express themselves: written English, written
Chinese (Cantonese) and Romanized Cantonese. The language use varies within a
single weblog or acorss the weblogs; there could be an entry written in pure Chinese
with characters only, or an entry written in a mixture of forms as code-switching, or
an entry written in English with alphabets only. There are different structural features
in an entry: titles, texts, links and images. Figure 1 shows the first screen of the
home page of a typical blog from the corpus, in which the above criteria are satisfied.
Figure 1: Screen of the home page of a typical Xanga blog
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The University of Edinburgh
Year of Presentation: 2007
The collected entries were written from January to May 2007, the participants were
informed to give out the data in June 2007 afterward. So, this ensures the natural
setting of writing online personal journal as the participants were not expected to
provide the data when they were producing the entries.
3.1.2 A corpus of English texts from blogging
To conduct the study about the structures of Hong Kong English in Part 2 in this
research, the second step of data collection is to select and sort out pure English texts
in blogging. Since the aim of this part is to describe the structures of sentences in
English, the patterns of English words and Cantonese characters mixing together are
not the focus. So, this corpus only involves texts which are composed of English
language elements, in a sense, every word in the texts must be composed of English
alphabets. Any texts which have English words and the forms of Chinese characters
alternated are excluded because they are considered to be code-switching texts in this
research, and the discussions about language mixing in blogging are presented in Part
1.
This corpus of English online personal journals is based on 8 selected blogs from Part
1 and only the first 20 English entries written by each of the eight bloggers since
January 1, 2007 were collected. In Part 1, the 20 participants are listed according to
their profiles of producing pure English entries, in descending order. Then, the top 8
out of 20 participants in the list (they are arranged to be Participant A to H in the
entire study), who have the highest profiles, are selected for Part 2. In a sense, the
selected bloggers in Part 2 are those who produced the higher numbers of English
entries within the five months. According to this selection method, the English texts in
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Part 2 are from bloggers who have a habit of writing English entries and this can
ensure the consistence of the structural patterns. This is important because only
consistent features can reflect the conventions of Hong Kong English. In the end, 160
English entries were collected, totaling 15892 words.
Also, this English-text corpus was tagged for two types of information in pursuit of
conducting qualitative analysis in the later stage. First, structural features of an entry
including title, body, links and images/icons are identified. Second, linguistic features
including topicalization, morphsyntax and CMC Hong Kong English characteristics,
are coded as they are the focuses in this research. The tagged texts are attached in
Appendix 1 and details of the coding are listed in Table 2.
Table 2: Codes for tagging the English-text corpus in Part 2
Item
Code
Example
Date
<date>
<date>Thursday, January
Title
<title>
Body
<body>
Paragraph
<>
Links
<!>
Image
<%>
Icon
<$>
HKE
features <t>
regarding
Topicalisation
HKE
features <v>
regarding
04, 2007<title>
Focus~<body><> There should only be ONE
focus, right? <> Thanks everyone for you
support.
<date>Thursday, January 04, 2007<title>
Focus~<body><> There should only be ONE
focus, right? <> Thanks everyone for you
support.
<date>Thursday, January 04, 2007<title>
Focus~<body><> There should only be ONE
focus, right? <> Thanks everyone for you
support.
<date>Thursday, January 04, 2007<title>
Focus~<body><> There should only be ONE
focus, right? <> Thanks everyone for you
support.
<body><><!><> the above link is for your
reference of the australian visa
<>I was so happy as I could finally buy my new
mobile...YEAH yeah<%><> LG Chocolate
KG800
<>We enjoyed Japanese food again!! So happy
<$>
<> u know, <t>ask an old lady w/ low back pain
to sit for 2 days is not a good idea.
i kept all the kids who couldn't pass at lunch time
and <v>force them to learn all the ten words
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The University of Edinburgh
Morphosyntax of
verbs
CMCHKE
<c>
features
Year of Presentation: 2007
appeared in the quiz b4 they went for lunch.
<> PS. well... i hv told you tat u <c>chaai si!
<>well, i use the rainbow lucky draw in other
classes as well <c>ga! not especially for 4D
<c>ga!
3.2 The Participants
All the data was collected from 20 bilinguals in Hong Kong coded from the alphabets
A to T. In Part 1, texts in the data are coded according to participants and dates. For
instance, the text written by Participant J on January 2, 2007 is coded PJ0102. In Part
2 only texts from Participant A to H are analyzed, as mentioned in the previous
section.
Concerning the demographic data, there are 4 males (20%) and 16 females (80%) in
the study. These participants are young people in between the age of 19 to 27; and
they are all considered as the Hong Kong people who use online communication most
frequently. According to ASIANET (2000), the age group 15-24 accounts for the
highest percentage of Internet users in Hong Kong (41.8%), followed by the group of
25-34 (26.7%). Except for Participant Q, who was attending pre-university education
(i.e. high school in UK); all of them were receiving or have received tertiary
education in Hong Kong (i.e. associate degree, university degree, and postgraduate
degree). All of them have been the users of Xanga for more than one year, some even
have owned more than one Xanga account. So, they are familiar with the functions of
writing online journals in Xanga. Each of them had at least produced one entry per
week from January to May in 2007 and the most updated entry was in May; so they
are actually some active Xanga blog users. The participants were approached through
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Year of Presentation: 2007
the writers’ own social network as they were all in the Subscription List in the writer’s
own weblog in Xanga. Demographic data and background information of the
participants are summarized in the following.
Table 3: Demographic information of the participants
Participant Age
Gender
Education
Career
Background
A
24
Female
University graduate
English Teacher
B
22
Female
Undergraduate
Undergraduate
student
Student
C
24
Female
University graduate
Nurse
D
27
Female
University graduate
Postgraduate
Student +
General
Skill Trainer
E
23
Male
Postgraduate student
Postgraduate
Student
F
24
Female
University graduate
Office Assistance
G
22
Female
Undergraduate
Undergraduate
student
Student
H
24
Female
University graduate
Executive
I
25
Female
University graduate
Biology Teacher
J
24
Female
University graduate
Flight Attendant
K
25
Female
University graduate
Merchandiser
L
23
Female
University graduate
English Teacher
M
26
Male
University graduate
Architecture
N
24
Female
University graduate
English Teacher
O
26
Male
University student
Private Tutor
P
23
Female
University graduate
Computer
Programmer
Q
19
Female
High school student
High School Student
R
23
Female
University graduate
Property
Management
S
23
Female
University graduate
Chinese Teacher
T
25
Male
University graduate
English Teacher
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Year of Presentation: 2007
3.3 Supplementary Data
3.3.1 Online instant messaging
Extracts of three online English conversations through MSN Messenger among three
couples of Hong Kong bilingual adolescents in between the age of 20 to 25 were
collected, as in Appendix 2. The data contains 100 turns of messages. The
conversations were conducted from January to May in 2007, the participants were
informed to give out the data in June 2007 afterward. So, this ensures the natural
setting of the online conversations as the participants were not expected to provide the
data when they were conducting the online conversations.
3.3.2 Taped casual conversations
Taped extracts of 3 three-minute dialogues in English from eight Hong Kong bilingual
adolescents in between the age of 17 to 25 were collected in June 2007, as in
Appendix 3. The participants were asked to talk about their daily life during the
recording. The conversations were transcribed by the writer. It is noted that in this
section the writer collected her own data instead of using instant materials such as the
data from the International Corpus of English (ICE). The reasons for not choosing the
instant one because in ICE each set of conversation data involves a native speaker;
and this cannot provide a natural situation for Hong Kong people to communicate
among themselves in English – which is a key criterion of this research.
3.4 Data Analysis
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The aim of this research is to describe the use of English in blogging owned by Hong
Kong people. Both quantitative and qualitative descriptions of Hong Kong English
will be covered.
In Part 1, an overview of the language distribution in the data will be presented. First,
the numbers of entries in English, Cantonese or code-mixing will be recorded. The
numbers will be tabulated and percentages calculated, and the results will be analyzed
to establish trends in the forms of charts and graphs. The analysis takes a genre-based
approach in discussing how the contexts influence the choice of language use in
online personal journals written by Hong Kong people. The approach is based on
Swales’ (1990) Genre Analysis, which seeks to describe language use in specific
contexts by specific groups and allows for the identification of smaller domains of
language use and for potentially any language mixing in each of the smaller domains.
This approach is adopted in this part of the research as this is practical to describe the
proportion and patterns of using English and Cantonese associated with the domains
of blogging written by Hong Kong people while bilingualism is a concern. In the
cause of revealing the results, some contextual factors including the bloggers’
background information and other sociolinguistic issues of Hong Kong will be
discussed.
Part 2 will present a structural description of Hong Kong English in the tagged
English-text corpus, with reference to three selected features: topicalisation,
morphosyntax and CMC Hong Kong English characteristics. In addition, the
identified Hong Kong English features will be further explored when comparing to
their counterparts in other online and off-line genres. Particularly, examples of such
features in the data collected from MSN Messenger and the taped casual
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Year of Presentation: 2007
conversations will be discussed in the comparison. The features will be analyzed,
accompanied by an outline of the sociolinguistic factors (influence of the contact
languages) and the sociocultural backgrounds (local contexts).
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Chapter 4 Results and Discussions (Part 1) – Language Distribution in blogging
4.1 Language use in blogging by Hong Kong people
4.1.1 Language distributions in blogging
In fact, in all the blogs under investigation, there was a complex pattern of language
alternation between Cantonese and English. Language alternation is a common
behaviour in bilingual communities. Specifically, in the present result, the Hong Kong
bloggers alternated Cantonese and English across different entries, within an entry,
and at the intra-sentential level. Also, such patterns varied among participants. Within
this genre, there is a continuum of language use from pure English, to inter-sentential
code-switching, to intra-sentential code-mixing, and to pure Cantonese. Figure 2a and
2b quantify the trend of participants’ choices of language use.
Figure 2a: Language Distributions in blogging (in terms of number of entries)
Language Distribution in blogging (1)
747
800
No. of entries
700
600
500
446
400
300
220
200
100
0
English
Cantonese
Languages
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Code-sw itching
The University of Edinburgh
Year of Presentation: 2007
Figure 2b: Language Distributions in blogging (in terms of percentages)
Language Distribution in blogging (2)
English texts
32%
Code-switching:
Cantonesedominant texts
48%
Cantonese texts
16%
Code-switching:
English-dominant
texts
4%
Figure 2a and 2b show that among the 1413 entries in the corpus collected from
January to May in 2007 from 20 Xanga blogs written by Hong Kong people, over half
of the entries consisted of language alternations (747 entries, 52%). They are all
considered as texts of code-switching (CS) in this research. The amount of
Cantonese-dominant texts (48%) outweighed that of English-dominant texts (4%) by
more than 10 times. In fact, there are different degrees of alternation between
Cantonese and English reflecting from inter-sentential to intra-sentential language
alternations. Apart from that, one-third of the texts were written in pure English (446
entries, 23%). And the minority text type in the data were entries written in Cantonese
(220 entries, 16%). Samples of each type of the above texts are provided in
Appendices 4a-d, respectively. In those texts, Romanized Cantonese words are
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Year of Presentation: 2007
considered to be English elements because they are in spellings instead of in
Cantonese character representations. So, example (9a) is considered to be an English
sentence in blogging in the present of two Romanized Cantonese items. Also, this
consideration corresponds to Bolton’s (2002) description of treating other Romanized
Cantonese items in his ICQ (a kind of online instant messaging) data among Hong
Kong university students as the ‘bubbling up’ of Hong Kong English vocabulary and
the creativity in the local English variety. And, Examples (9b) and (9c) are considered
to be sentences of code-switching with the alternation of Cantonese characters and
English-spelling words.
(9)
a. te vice-principal said ‘you guys have your own note-book ga la (Romanized
Cantonese: End-of-sentence particles), no need to borrow from us.’
<PB0319, 10:21am>
b. but my concern is, I hv to learn how to type Chinese in 速成 (Cantonese
meaning Simplified Chajei Chinese Input Method)
<PJ0119, 5:28pm>
c.
今日
的
AEP Presentation
好 差
gamyaht dik
AEP Presentation
hou cha
today
POSS AEP Presentation very bad
‘the AEP Presentation was very bad today’
<PB0216, 7:02pm>
4.1.2 A comparison with other genres
According to Pennington (1994), the social norms in Hong Kong bilingual community
are against using English for intraethnic communication. Rather, Cantonese and a
variety of mixed codes in which English subject matter lexis being inserted into a
Cantonese utterance frame are more convenient and politically correct mediums for
the majority. Li (1996) has agreed on this overt code-switching behaviour among
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Hong Kong people in a discussion on the four motivations for code-switching in
Hong Kong. He proves that linguistically inserting English words and phrases at the
intrasentential level can help fulfil communicative purposes in informal situation.
Overall, Cantonese-English code-mixing is a common feature in communication of
Hong Kong bilinguals; and another convention is that Hong Kong people prefer
Cantonese over English for intraethnic communication. However, it seems that not
every communication context follows such a convention. Based on the above statistic,
the distribution of language use in blogging may not be completely parallel to the
conventions in other social communications in Hong Kong such as daily
conversations and online instant messaging. With the support of the presented data
and two previous studies, the following is a discussion on a comparison in language
distributions between the three distinct text types.
Figure 3, which is quoted from the study about language distributions in
conversations conducted by Pennington and Balla (1998), indicates that the usage of
Cantonese mixed with English among Hong Kong university students was reported to
be moderate in conversation. However, in the blogging situation, code-switching was
the most dominant language use. Also, while Figure 2a and 2b show that Cantonese
was used the least frequently in blogging, Figure 3 shows a High usage of Cantonese
in conversation. And, while English had occupied over one-third of the space in
blogging, in conversation among university students the usage of English remained
low. So, only the usage of English mixed with some Cantonese words appeared to be
low in both conversation and blogging. It is suggested that there are differences
between daily conversations and blogging in terms of language distributions.
Additionally, there could be a limitation in this comparison because the natures of the
two studies are different. In Pennington and Balla (1998) the participants self-reported
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Year of Presentation: 2007
their experience of language use in conversation while in this current study the pattern
of language use in blogging was observed by the researcher as the third person.
Figure 3: Mean Use of Language Medium for General and Situational Contexts,
quoted from Pennington and Balla (1998)
Language Use
Conversation
Cantonese (Chinese)
1.3
Code
Cantonese (Chinese) 2.2
w/some English
Mean
Interpretation
English
w/some 3.2
Cantonese(Chinese)
1.0-1.4
1.5-1.9
2.0-2.9
3.0-3.5
3.6-4.0
Very high usage
High usage
Moderate usage
Low usage
Very low usage
English
3.0
Putonghua
3.9
Table 4: What language do you usually use in the following forms of
communication? (Bodomo, 2004)
A. Chinese/ B. English C. Chinese/ D. Other E.
Cantonese Only
Cantonese + (Specific) N/A
Only
English
MSN
20
7
84
3
66
Messenger
However, when comparing the language distribution in blogging to that in other CMC
genres produced by Hong Kong people, the gap may be narrowed. Bodomo (2004)
indicates in his survey report that in the context of CMC, specifically in MSN
Messenger (a type of online instant messaging communication), code-mixed messages
were heavily dominant. Table 4, which was extracted from the report, shows that
among the 180 secondary school students in Hong Kong, 114 students gave positive
answers to the question “What language do you usually use in the following forms of
communication?”. Among the 144 respondents, 84 respondents (73.7%) usually used
code-mixing of English and Cantonese in MSN Messenger, while Chinese was the
second common language (20 respondents, 17.5%) and English was the least common
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Year of Presentation: 2007
choice (7 respondents, 6.0%). Compare this to the data of blogging in this research; it
seems that the two referring CMC genres shared a similar pattern that the usage of
code-switching of English and Cantonese had the highest profile. However, the
language use in blogging was different from that in MSN Messenger because the
usage of English in blogging (32%) was five-time more popular than in the instant
messaging situation (6%). Additionally, this comparison shares the same limitation:
the natures of the two studies are different, since the study on MSN Messenger
involve self-reporting data and the current study on blogging involves third-person
observation.
It is noticed that English is still the minority language in all the three information
situations discussed above. However, it seems that the usage of English is rather
significant in blogging as English texts occupy one-third of the entries of online
personal journals in the data. So, the situations of using English in blogs seem to be
on the periphery of the social norm in Hong Kong, since bilingual community are
against using English for intraethnic communication. It is an interesting observation
and the enquire would be what factors motivating Hong Kong people to use English
more frequently in blogging but not in other informal situations like daily
conversation and online instant messaging. Two key factors are suggested. First, the
use of language in blogging has undergone an Internet language revolution, but in a
slower progress. In the last decade, English dominated computer and the Internet.
However, according to Graddol (2006), while local languages have been gaining
power among bilingual internet users, the strength of English has declined. Such
language revolution has bought bigger influence to MSN than to blogging. This could
be explained by that in MSN, the users have rather spontaneous communication with
their intraethnic members; thus the social norm has its part of catalyzing the Internet
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Year of Presentation: 2007
language revolution. In blogging, although to a large extent the users are expecting
friends in the intraethnic community to read their journals; the readership is open to
public and the sense of intraethnic communication is weaken; so English is still
preferred. Second, bloggers may prefer using English for economy reasons, especially
when they are typing a large piece of journal instead of short utterances in MSN.
Actually, every user has to learn particular methods of inputting Chinese characters
into computer, and, sometimes special software is required. The quotes in (10a-b)
from Participant A’s entries PA0315 prove that Chinese input software motivates her
to use Chinese. Generally, these conditions may be less available to some bloggers;
for them, typing Cantonese is more time-consuming than typing English in certain
cases.
(10)
a. (PA0315, 9:05pm) “ okok... i finally dig out my chinese input software CDR, i
AM GOING to install it NOW!”
b. (PA0315, 10:19pm) “終於
打
到
中文”
finally type PRT Chinese
‘finally (I) can type Chinese’
4.2 The usage of English in Xanga
This section takes the genre-based analysis and presents the results of language use in
personal online journals written by Hong Kong bloggers. The statistics presented in
Figure 2a and 2b will be discussed again with the supplement of some selected
samples from the corpus. The analysis attempts to characterize the usage of English in
the contexts. Relevant sociolinguistic background and personalized information will
be included in the discussion. Patterns of language use in blogging by each participant
are presented in Table 5.
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Table 5: Language use in blogging by each participant
No. of
Eng
Can
CS
Participant Age Career
English
Cantonese
CS
Entries
%
%
%
A
24 English Teacher
95
25 26.3
5 5.3 65 68.4
Undergraduate
B
22
55
35 63.6
0 0.0 20 36.4
Student
C
24 Nurse
33
21 63.6
0 0.0 12 36.4
Postgraduate
Student +
D
27
52
46 88.5
3 5.8 3 5.8
General Skill
Trainer
Postgraduate
E
23
181
113 62.4
27 14.9 41 22.7
Student
Office
F
24
61
21 34.4
10 16.4 30 49.2
Assistance
Undergraduate
G
22
138
100 72.5
11 8.0 27 19.6
Student
H
24 Executive
80
40 50.0
8 10.0 32 40.0
I
25 Biology Teacher
33
0 0.0
6 18.2 27 81.8
Flight
J
24
100
19 19.0
10 10.0 71 71.0
Attendeant
K
25 Merchandiser
77
5 6.5
21 27.3 51 66.2
L
23 English Teacher
111
3 2.7
1 0.9 107 96.4
M
26 Architecture
55
1 1.8
20 36.4 34 61.8
N
24 English Teacher
59
1 1.7
13 22.0 45 76.3
O
26 Private Tutor
41
0 0.0
10 24.4 31 75.6
Computer
P
23
25
8 32.0
5 20.0 12 48.0
Programmer
High School
Q
19
37
1 2.7
16 43.2 20 54.1
Student
Property
R
23
68
3 4.4
28 41.2 37 54.4
Management
Chinese
S
23
25
1 4.0
10 40.0 14 56.0
Teacher
T
25 English Teacher
87
3 3.4
16 18.4 68 78.2
Total
1413
446 31.6
220 15.6 747 52.9
4.2.1 Pure English entries in blogging
Devised from Table 5, the data in Table 6 was sorted according to the percentage of
English entries in the selected blogging in descending order. A quarter of the
participants actually used pure English to write over 50% of their entries. And 4 out of
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Year of Presentation: 2007
these 5 participants were currently studying in the university (they were highlighted in
yellow in Table 6); except that Participant D was a part-time postgraduate student, the
other three were full-time students. It seems that students would use more English in
writing blogs, comparing to that the frequency of English usage by people from the
working class is below 50%. This can be explained by that a high profile of English
usage is found in tertiary education based on the characteristics that English is the
medium of instruction in the university. University students spend most of the time
receiving and producing both spoken and written English during lectures, seminars,
doing presentations, projects and essays. After the tertiary education, the exposure to
English normally falls. In the workplace, English is the main language in written
communication, with elaboration in Cantonese; but normally Cantonese or coded-mix
is the default language for oral communication. This phenomenon may be due to the
economy and convenience of communication as Cantonese is the mother tongue
language. Also, another cause could be the social norms against using English for
intraethnic communication in the society. Whenever Hong Kong people have choices,
they would choose Cantonese to communicate with other Chinese. So, these factors of
different profiles of English usage in education and workplace do cause differences in
the usage of English between bloggers who are students and bloggers who have
started their career, which is evident in the data. Another piece of evidence is that
except Participant D, all the participants in the older age group of 25-34 (they are
highlighted in blue in Table 5) used less than 10% English in their blogs. This could
imply that, in terms of number of years, the more distant from the high-profile tertiary
education the bloggers are, the less initiative they have to use English to write their
online personal journals. Their exposure to Cantonese in the daily life has outweighed
that of English. Eventually, they use the language they normally use to at work and in
daily life to write their journals, as these issues are very popular topics in online
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Year of Presentation: 2007
personal journals.
Table 6: The English usage in blogging by each participant
No. of
Participant Age Career
English Eng%
Entries
Postgraduate Student+General Skill
D
27
52
46 88.5
Trainer
G
22 Undergraduate Student
138
100 72.5
B
22 Undergraduate Student
55
35 63.6
C
24 Nurse
33
21 63.6
E
23 Postgraduate Student
181
113 62.4
H
24 Executive
80
40 50.0
F
24 Office Assistance
61
21 34.4
P
23 Computer Programmer
25
8 32.0
A
24 English Teacher
95
25 26.3
J
24 Flight Attendeant
100
19 19.0
K
25 Merchandiser
77
5
6.5
R
23 Property Management
68
3
4.4
S
23 Chinese Teacher
25
1
4.0
T
25 English Teacher
87
3
3.4
L
23 English Teacher
111
3
2.7
Q
19 High School Student
37
1
2.7
M
26 Architecture
55
1
1.8
N
24 English Teacher
59
1
1.7
I
25 Biology Teacher
33
0
0.0
O
26 Private Tutor
41
0
0.0
4.2.2 English in code-switching entries
Figure 2b shows that in the data 52% of entries were code-switching texts while the
Cantonese-dominant texts were 10 times more than the English-dominant ones. In the
corpus, a single English word surrounded by Cantonese is the most frequent form of
Cantonese-English alternation. This is the major pattern which congregated the
Cantonese-dominant texts. The minor patterns are vice versa, with a Cantonese
expression being surrounded by English. Besides, alternations also occur beyond the
sentential level. They are those alternated between Cantonese and English at the
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Year of Presentation: 2007
inter-sentential level and across paragraphs or sections. Actually, the usage of
code-switching in blogging is more similar to what can be observed in the
face-to-face conversation among Hong Kong people. The code-switching patterns are
illustrated below with selected examples from the corpus.
First, concerning the major patterns, the English elements found in Cantonese-English
code-mixing in blogging among Hong Kong people are mostly of one or two words in
length, surrounded by Cantonese. Since many participants talked about their jobs in
their journals, thus relevant technical jargon expressions in English are common
code-mixing elements. For example, in (11a) from PJ0117, Participant J was a flight
attendant and she mixed some English expressions about aircraft into her Cantonese
text, including “set crew”, “purser” and “overhead locker”. In (11b) from PM0201,
Participant M was an architect and he mixed words like “Completion Project”,
“External Wall Renovation Work” and “design” in his Cantonese text. It seems that
the English vocabulary being mixed could be domain-specific.
(11)
a.
<PJ0117>
而且 set crew
好 nice~ purser 又
好
喎。
and set crew very nice purser also good PRT
‘and the whole set of crew are very nice, the purser is also good’
阿媽
話
supervisor
趁
我
when I
勁
裝
見
到
有
個
客
said see PRT have
CL passenger
企 上
去 overhead locker
拎
野
stand up to overhead locker take stuff
我
裙
底
ADV peep my skirt bottom
‘my supervisor said she saw a passenger take a furtive glance at the bottom
of my skirt when I stood up to take something from the overhead locker’
b. <PM0201>
終於
完成
了
江西
共青城
finally finish ASP
JiangXi
的
Completion Project
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POSS Completion Project
‘finally (we) have finished the Completion Project of Kungching City in
JiangXi’
星港酒店
External Wall
Renovation Work
Extenernal Wall Renovation Work
New Harbour Hotel
快
soon
完工
complete
‘the External Wall Renovation Work for New Harbour Hotel is soon to be
completed’
要
同 Stru.E
同 E&M 同 CLP
夾
design
need with Stru.E with E&M with CLP co-operate design
‘(we) need to co-operate with Stru.E, E&M and CLP to do the design’
Structurally,
most
of
the
Cantonese-English
code-mixing
patterns
in
Cantonese-dominant texts have been governed by the Cantonese rule. That is,
Cantonese is the matrix code and it governs the grammar of the utterance; while
English is the embedded code and English words can fit into the surrounding
Cantonese phrase. Examples are as follows:
(12)
Features
Examples from data
a. Cantonese
Classifier (CL)
preceding English
noun
只
b. Cantonese Aspect
marker (ASP)
replacing English
inflections for tense
experiment
experiment
c. Cantonese copular
be not preceding
English predicate
adjectives
因為
係
一
個
only is one CL
‘it is only a mistake’
<PT0314>
一
個
mistake
mistake
又
consume
again consume
左
我
ASP me
下午
one CL afternoon
‘the experiment had consumed one of my
afternoons’
<PP0312>
我地 好 sweet
好 happy
because we very sweet very happy
‘because we are very sweet and happy’
<PJ0503>
Second, in blogging, there is a limited degree of code-mixing in those sentences with
English as the matrix language. This minority patterns happen when a single
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Cantonese word is mixing in the sentence. Most examples just follow and the
syntactic frame of English, as in (13a-b). In (13a), the noun phrase fulfils the syntax
of English, with the Cantonese nominal 禮盒(‘gift set’) being preceded by an article
and the modifier “Hello Kitty” while articles are absent in Cantonese. In (13b), the
Cantonese adjective 勁(‘brilliant’) was modified by the adverb “very” as in English
adjective phrase and the copular be precedes the adjective phrase in the predicate.
However, there is example in which the insertion of Cantonese words has ruined the
English syntax, as in (13c). In the example, according to the English syntax, an article
is missing before the head of the noun phrase 新牌仔(‘a person who have just got the
driving license’). The omission can be due to the influence of Cantonese because
articles are absent in Cantonese noun phrase.
(13)
a. Last nite I received a Hello Kitty 禮盒 (Cantonese Noun meaning ‘gift set’)
from my tuitee’s mother <PB0221>
b. He is very 勁 (Cantonese Adjective meaning ‘brilliant’) <PL0307>
c. It’s not good for 新牌仔 (Cantonese Noun meaning ‘a person who have just
got the driving license’) like me to switch between car models every time
<PG0407>
Furthermore, English-Cantonese alternations across paragraphs and sections are
frequently observed in the data. Such kind of switch was common when something is
expressed emotionally. For example, the sample 14a from PF0502 shows the blogger
switched from English to Cantonese to further express her feelings. This may be due
to the fact that Hong Kong people would find it easier to express something
figuratively in the mother tongue – Cantonese. Interestingly, the few lines of
Cantonese Participant F used are lyrics. Actually, it is a very common approach
bloggers use to extend feelings towards the emotional issues. Also, in PA0204,
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Participant A switched from English to Cantonese when she complained about her
workload as a teacher, as in 14b.
(14)
a. i feel the need of more guarantee...to make me more conscious abt where i m
in the relationship~ WOW..i dunno what i really wanna say here.....a very
complicated week~........but i just feel that maybe it's time...... 如果戀愛為結婚
如果擁抱為名份 何苦等半生 沒人沒有情人 如果甘心 誰的心可及你狠 誰肯恩
愛亦榮幸
‘if we date for marriage, if we hug for title, why do we wait for half of our life;
nobody lacks lovers if you’re contended; the one who has a cruel heart is the
one who wants to love and be proud of you’ (Translation of the Cantonese
lyrics)
<PF0502>
b. jux planned this week's teaching schedule duno if i can handle it but i really
hope to KO 2 writings in this week, i wonder if i can return the writings to my
kids b4 CNY, jux wanna say: 你辛苦，老師也辛苦，大家都要撐下去。
‘You’re working hard, your teachers are working hard too, let’s support each
other and go on.’ (Translation)
<PA0204>
4.3 HKE in blogging
Examining the pure English entries from the data, it is found that the bloggers
frequently performed some common Hong Kong English features, which were
identified in previous studies. Table 7 illustrates some examples which correspond to
the identified structures of Hong Kong English in those previous research studies.
According to the data, it seems that many of the Hong Kong English features are
attributed to the influence of Cantonese. But still, some of them may be caused by
bloggers’ not proofreading their entries in such an informal context. This is also
evident that there are many spelling errors in the data.
Table 7: Hong Kong English features in the data
Features
Examples from data
Cantonese influence
a. Blur on parts I am not good at socialing There is no parts of speech in
of speech
with strangers <PB0102>
Cantonese.
b. Omission of I am actually doing what the Aspect markers are used to
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auxiliary verbs
housewives doing in those express tense and aspect in
banks <PB0105>
Cantonese, auxiliary ‘be’ are
not necessary.
c. Simplification Recently I learn two There is no inflection in
of the inflection phrases.. <PB0207>
Cantonese, instead aspect
system
markers or adverbs like
“recently” are used to express
tense.
Wrong spelling
I do it quietly at home. /
<PB0105>
4.4 CMCHKE in blogging
Concerning language use of Computer-mediated Communication in the Hong Kong
context, the bloggers from the data demonstrated the three very common CMCHKE
features: Romanized Cantonese, Literal translation of Cantonese to English and End
of sentence Particles. They are illustrated in Table 8.
Table 8: Hong Kong English features in Computer-mediated Communication in
the data
Features
Examples
Target
English
expression
a. Romanized ho sleepy <PG0129>
‘ho’
Cantonese
(very)
b.
Literal Drove quite well today, at ‘die fire’
translation of least not even any ‘die fire’ (the machine shuts down)
Cantonese to <PG0205>
English
c. End of When
can
we
have Question Particle
sentence
Breakfast together again
particles
lei!? <PG0129>
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Chapter 5 Results and Discussions (Part 2) - Features of Hong Kong English in
blogging
This chapter focuses on the data in the corpus of English entries and gives a detailed
account of some structural features of English written by Hong Kong bloggers in the
data. Three HKE features including topicalisation, morphosyntax for verbs and
HKECMC features are presented in three separated sections. They will be discussed
with reference to the nature of blogs and the sociolinguistic background. Also, this
chapter will ends with a comparison between the certain features in blogging and their
distribution in daily conversation and in MSN dialogues.
5.1 Topicalisation
Blogging provides a space for Hong Kong people to narrate, reflect and comment on
certain issues. There could be many topics in one single entry of online personal
journal. New information is revealed according to the order of issues narrated or
expressed by the bloggers. Usually, a topic of discourse is introduced as a sentence
topic. So, the topic of each sentence is crucial to reveal new or old information and
maintain the cohesion within a text. This section looks at how Hong Kong bloggers
structure the topics in English. The section starts with a brief account of the
topicalisation in Standard English, and follows with a detailed analysis on the
variations.
In Standard English, it is a grammatical requirement that every sentence must have a
subject. That is, all English sentences must have a noun phrase preceding the verb
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(except that it is an imperative). Typically a subject means the doer of the action and
that represents what the sentence is about (topic). According to Halliday (1994), such
topic element is called Theme (interchangeable with Topic). In each of the following
examples, the subject is the Topic of the sentence.
(15)
Topic
a.
The man
is going to die.
b.
I
went to the church today.
c.
The clown
looks funny.
On the other hand, when there is no such notional subject present, the expletive there
or ‘dummy’ subject it would be used, as in It’s so warm today and There are too many
people in the room respectively. Sometimes, the subjects can be removed from the
topic position or even omitted when the object has been topicalised, as in (16a) and
(16b), respectively.
(16)
Topic
a.
The cat
was hit by a car.
b.
The machine
has been repaired.
Also, it is not necessary for a subject to front a sentence. The subject can be the
second topic while the first one has been taken up by conjunctions or adverbials to
express the circumstances, as in (17a-c).
(17)
Topic
Topic
a.
On Sunday morning
I
go to church
b.
Eventually
he
found out the secret.
c.
but
he
is going to Thailand next week.
In Standard English, a verb can also be topicalised, but only when the construction
applies in imperatives, as in (18a-b).
(18)
Topic
a.
Stir
it well with a wooden spoon.
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b.
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Don’t step
English,
Cantonese
on the grass.
is
a
topic-prominent
language
rather
than
subject-prominent language and it has a more flexible word order than English
(Huang, 1989). Indeed, Cantonese is a pro-drop language where certain classes of
pronouns may be dropped when there is a sense of pragmatic function (Huang, 1989).
Concerning the use of topicalisation in the English online personal journals written by
Hong Kong people in the data, there are significant characteristics that are slightly
different from the grammatical requirements of the Standard English. Some major
variations of topicalisation in Hong Kong English in the data are presented below.
5.1.1 Verb Topicalisation with subject omission
In the data there is an extremely prominent feature - verb topicalisation. It is very
likely for a blogger to produce sentences fronted by a verb instead of a subject, while
it is not an imperative situation. In (19a-g) from the data, the subject is omitted in a
sentence, so the verb is topicalised. Particularly, when the blogger was sharing his/her
personal experience or opinion, the default subject is the first-person pronoun. Also, it
is expected that the readers can share the same background knowledge and can infer
whom the subject (writer) refers. With this kind of self-identification, it is likely for
the bloggers to drop the personal pronoun “I” and the subject is omitted. On the other
hand, the omission of subjects could be marked as broken sentences or incomplete
sentences. Such loosely structured written English actually resembles the language
use in the informal spoken discourse, and this reflects a degree of orality of the
language in blogging.
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(19)
a. Watched Mr. Bean <>
Went to Macau again ...lost money ah this time
Assignment lae...nothing much was done
b. Have resumed my piano practice and gym again...
Vy happy..new start and will not be ended
c. Going to another cso interview next morning....
feeling a bit lost as i only focus on sending out applications...so that i
keep myself busy for doing sth
d. Day off
Had 13 hrs of sufficient sleep finally.........n waited for my honey to come over
after work~~Happy to see u today
e. met a very good car instructor today
f. sunday: badminton + watched my super-X girl friend....not an interesting one
Monday: Running in the gym ...
Need to go to school tomorrow la~
g. saw phantom again
didn't intend to see it
we thought we would see sth called the 'blue man group'
but i don't know why we saw it in the end
didn't have much expectation since i have already seen the movie and the
live drama in hk
(20)
a. aiya,
mouh samgei
wan-syu
PRT not-have
heart
revise book PRT
‘I don’t feel like revising my books !’
b. hou jou
je, m seung faan
very early only not want return
home
‘It’s just very early, I don’t want to go home.’
a
ngukkei
PRT
a
To a large extent, the pattern of subject omission may be influenced by the
characteristics of pronoun omission in the participants’ native language, Cantonese.
According to Matthews and Yips (1994), subjects or objects of the Cantonese
sentence are often left out. Particularly, they can readily be omitted where the topics
of the discourse is already established. In (20a-b), in the context of expressing the
speakers’ personal feelings, the subjects in the Cantonese sentences are dropped.
Normally, in each piece of online personal journals, the writers would usually involve
personal matters. Since the reference of first person subject is clear from the context,
the omission of subject may be encouraged by the influence in Cantonese.
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On the other hand, this pattern could also be found in native varieties of English when
the native speakers are writing off-line antecedents or online instant messaging. Werry
(1996) also reports that in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) subject pronouns are often
deleted to a considerable degree. Such syntactically-reduced form is one of the
strategies which function to reduce the time and effort necessary to communicate in
CMC. The following examples are quoted from Werry (1996:54).
(21)
a. <Keels> goodby gonna try and do something smart for once
b. <Keels> got to go for a sec
c. <Alvin> < -- is fine and studly thank you
(Werry, 1996:54)
Another common pattern corresponding to the verb topicalisation is that the blogger
started with a topic sentence and elaborated with a chain of verb-topicalised sentences.
That is, the omitted subject has been the topic of a previous sentence, as in (22a-b)
from the data. It may be influenced by the effect of Topic Chains (Matthews and Yips,
1994) in Cantonese. The notion of topic chain refers to a series of connected
sentences or clauses sharing the same topic. The topic of the first clause serves as the
subject or object of several following clauses, as ‘Ah-Ming’ serves as the subject of
the following two clauses (23). In each of the examples in (22) from the data, the
blogger narrated a series of events, and dropped the subjects which have been the
topic of a previous sentence. In (22a), ‘I’ serves not only as the subject of the verb
‘keep’ but also as the subject of the other verbs ‘prepare’, ‘try’ and ‘started’. In (22b),
the third person singular pronoun ‘she’ serves not only as the subject of ‘was’ but also
the subject of ‘no need to use’(did not need to use). Similarly, in (22c), the third
personal singular pronoun “he” (referring to Johnny) is dropped in the last sentence.
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(22)
a. i keep my Ss’ head down nearly every lesson
prepare my lessons seriouly every lesson
try to make my lesson be more happy
and started marking the first few report
b. she was sooooooo energetic …
no need to use the wheelchair
c. there was another race for johnny
he finished his lesson at 2 and then had to rush to kowloon station to take the
airport express
luckily, no big traffic jam at all
managed to get there just before 3
(23)
A-Ming
gam-lin
heui
meihgwok
dujksyu. Sahp-yuht
jau
la.
Ah-Ming this year go
United States study October leave PRT
Yihga gaau gan chimjing.
Now
deal ASP VISA
‘Ming is going to study in United States this year. (He) will leave in October. (He)
is dealing with the VISA now.’
5.1.2 Circumstances topicalisations
Apart from verb topicalisation, there are other contexts of subject omission when the
sentence is topicalised by other particular word categories in the data.
First, when the sentence is fronted with the circumstances expressions such as a time
adverbial or place adverbial, it is more likely for the blogger to drop the subject. That
is, the expression of circumstance is topicalised, as in (24a-h) from the data. However,
the sentence topics have no grammatical relationship to the predicates. In (24a), the
topic ‘At night’ is not the subject of any action, but indicates the circumstances (in the
evening) to which the predicate ‘(I) had dinner with Telolo and his family’. Actually,
such variation may be affected by the ‘topic-prominent’ features of Cantonese
(Matthews and Yips, 1994). In Cantonese, it is possible to topicalise an expression
which is not the subject of the action. Such a topic sets the frame in which the
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sentence is to be understood. The Cantonese sentence in (25a) shows that the topic
Gammaahn (‘Tonight’) sets the time frame for eating Korean food (predicate). It
is also noticed that in such cases prepositions are often omitted to express a location
or a time in Cantonese, as in (25b). The topic Heunggong (‘Hong Kong’)
indicates the context in which the sentence is to be understood, but there is no
expression corresponding to the English proposition “in” to fit it before
Heunggong in the sentence as a location. Actually, in Cantonese, the head noun
laugha (‘flat-price’) will normally be pre-modified by Heunggong (‘Hong
Kong’) with a possessive marker ‘ge’ (corresponding to –‘s in English), as in (25c). In
this case of circumstances topicalisation in Cantonese, the possessive marker is
dropped and thus 25b is produced. Also, for such topicalisation in Cantonese, (24a-h)
seem to correspond to this influence: the time expression in each of the sentences,
which states the circumstances, is topicalised. At the same time, this time expression
precedes the verb because the subject is omitted.
(24)
a. At night, had dinner with Telolo and his family…
hoesntly, i dun like having dinner with such a big group people
b. parents day, preparing wut I should talk to the parents
hope tat i won't become a frozen chicken in the classroom
c. Finally...finished typing the minute of the 1st meeting... time for sleep
Yesterday...
Reviewing the photos of few years ago...
reli felt that I was so thin
d. the medicine made me feel more dizzy but was no able to make me sleep
well
this morning, still went to work
keep spreading bateria in my office
e. Plaaning the trip to Las Vegas again.
This time, must do some crazy things........
If I dare to...........hahahahahahahaha
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f.
Year of Presentation: 2007
afternoon, ate tsui wah together
g. at nite, had a buffet again
just can't eat much even we didn't eat anything at the resort
h. spent the rest of the nite doing nth and lying on my bed...
sunday went 'morning tea' w/ mom n dad.
(25)
(a) Gammaahn sihk Hohngwok-yahn
Tonight
eat
Korean
‘We’re going to eat Korean food tonight.’
(b) Heunggong
Hongkong
laugha
hou
flat-price very
gou
high
‘Flat prices in Hong Kong are very high.’
(c) Heunggong
Hongkong
ge
laugha
POSS flat-price very
hou
gou
high
‘Flat prices in Hong Kong are very high.’
On the other hand, there are examples in which the topic is an expression of
circumstance but the subject is reserved. In (26a-b) from the data, ‘valentine’s day’
and ‘the next day’ are not the subject, but indicate the circumstances (‘on Valentine’s
day’ and ‘on the next day’) to which the predicates apply. Since the subjects ‘i’ and ‘I’
are also present, such sentences seem to have double-subject construction. In such
kind of construction, the preposition in the topic is dropped, as in ‘(on) valentine’s
day’ and ‘(on) the next day’. This corresponds to the ‘topic-prominent’ feature in
Cantonese, as in (25b).
(26)
a. valentine’s day…i kept all the kids after school to learn the ten words again
b. the next day…I got to school
Second, when a sentence is fronted by an adverb (interpersonal theme) or a
conjunction (textual theme), it is more likely for the blogger to drop the subject, as in
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(27a-g) from the data. This could be explained by that, when the adverb or the
conjunction is regarded as the prominent topic, bloggers would pay less attention on
the subject as the secondary topic (experiential theme). At the same time the subject is
being referred in the context and thus it is dropped. Considering the influence of the
contact language, such argument can be further supported with the evidence of the
‘topic-prominent’ features of Cantonese: as in Cantonese it is legal to topicalise an
expression which has no grammatical relationship to the predicate.
(27)
a. finally fixed the wireless broadband
b. Finally go back to work tonight at 8…worked until 11:30
c. Finally got online here…
d. Suddenly want to see it so bad
e. actually, tried it two years b4
f.
finally managed to get on the plane
g. actually intended to take a both coz the bath tub has the spa function
5.1.3 Other topicalisations involving the omission of ‘it’
In Standard English, a subject does not always represent the performer of an action
(agent) or what the sentence is about (topic); when there is no such notional subject
present, the expletive ‘there’ or dummy subject ‘it’ is used. In Cantonese, there is no
pronoun corresponding to ‘there’ and ‘it’ in this sense, and many sentences lack an
overt subject. Such Cantonese features may have influenced the English written by
Hong Kong people. In (28a-c), the sentences are fronted by the raising verb ‘seem’
which does not assign a thematic role to the subject. In Standard English, ‘it’ should
be used in the meaningless subject position. In Hong Kong English, the writers may
refer such grammatical context to the absence of dummy subject in Cantonese and
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omit it directly. In (29a-e), both the dummy subject and copular be as in ‘it is’ are
omitted before the adjectives and noun phrases. In Standard English the subject
position must be filled with a dummy subject, as in ‘it is the first time…’ and ‘it is
lucky that…’. In (30a-b), the expletive ‘there’ is omitted. In Standard English
existential ‘there is/are’ must be used to introduce the new topic, as in ‘there is
nowhere to go…’ and ‘there are so many secret plans…’.
(28)
a. seems no one will hv his/her b-day in the coming week…
b. rained cats and dogs
c. Seem that it is no way to match my schedule
(29)
a. Seems that I was too busy in the past few months
b. Time to quit it perhaps
c. first time that he is willing to wear purple
d. lucky tat the student knows how to use fast key
e. too bad that I needa pick up on my tutoring again
(30)
a. Nowhere to go on my sleeping day…
b. So many secret plan in my mind
5.1.4 Verbal noun phrase Topicalisation
In the data, when a sentence is topicalised by a gerund noun phrase as a constituent, it
is found that sometimes bloggers would not inflect the verb root with the suffix –ing.
In (31a), ‘asking’ would be more appropriate in Standard English. In (31b), ‘Being
happy for a day’ is a proper gerund noun phrase in Standard English, as ‘happy for a
day’ is not a constituent to be topicalised. This might have resembled the Cantonese
structure because Cantonese gerund noun phrases start with a verb without any
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inflection, as in (32a) which correspond to (31a).
(31)
a. ask an old lady w/ low back pain to sit for 2 days is not a good idea
b. happy for a day means it’s killing for today4
(32)
a. giu
yat
go yauh buijek haibihn
tung ge
louh
taaitaai
ask one CL have back low
pain LP old lady
heui choh leuhng yaht
m
haih yat
go hou
jyuyi
to
sit
two
days NEG
is one CL good idea
‘asking an old lady who has low back pain to sit for two days is not a good idea’
5.1.5 Overemphasizing the topic
Also, in the data the bloggers tended to overemphasize the topic. In (33a-b), the topics
‘today’s lessons’ and ‘I haven’t updated xanga for ages’ are repeated as pronouns
‘they’ and ‘it’, respectively. In (33c-d), the blogger used certain language devices such
as ‘for’ to put the topic at the beginning of a sentence. This could be affected by the
Topic-Comment structure in Cantonese syntax: topicalisation often refers to the
placement of a word or a phrase at the beginning of a sentence. The bloggers may
refer such Cantonese structure to a similar one in English as ‘for…’ or ‘concerning’,
and produce redundant topicalised elements at the beginning.
(33)
a. today’s lessons…I think they’re q smooth
b. I haven’t updated xanga for ages…It is because everything is just the same
c. for the color stuff…if u come to check my lucky draw wood, I’ll know how I
organized them
d. for the rides…i didn’t take all the them since they were so TIRING
4
Context: The writer was talking about that she had a very relaxing day on the day before and thus she
would have a tough day to catch up with her work on that day.
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5.1.6 Object topicalisation
According to Matthews and Yips (1994), in Cantonese the most common form of
topicalisation is that the object of the verb is displaced at the beginning of the
sentence. But in English, passive is typically used to make the object the topic of the
sentence. In the data, the blogger might have utilized the Cantonese tactic in their
English entries and have simply topicalised the object ‘loads of movies’ in (34a).
Instead, the form in Standard English should be “I wanna watch loads of movies’.
(34)
a. loads of movies i wanna watch
5.2 Morphosyntax for verb
This section focuses on the variations of verb forms in Hong Kong English. In
blogging, there are a lot of elements of narration and reflection. To present the time of
different events, the expressions of tenses is significant in bloggers’ journals. In
English, tenses are largely expressed through the inflection on verbs. From the data, it
is found that there is variation in such type of inflections on verbs in Hong Kong
English, however.
This has been evident in some previous research studies that there is a tendency for
Hong Kong people to reduce the English word-final morphosyntactical elements
(Gisborne 2002, Joseph 2004). Native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong may
delete –ed/-d and –s which mark the number, person or tense of a verb. Matthews and
Yip (1994) and Gisborne (2002) also suggest that the deletion of the morphemes
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appears to be caused by the absence of inflection in Cantonese.
In Standard English, inflection is adopted to produce different grammatical forms
(walk, walks, walked, walking) of a lexeme (walk). The forms are contrasting in
number, person and tense through inflection.
It is noticed that the selection of
different grammatical forms in verbs is related to the syntax as they behave according
to the grammatical contexts. Generally, each verb does have five suppletive forms
which correspond to seven different grammatical contexts, as in Table 9. Regular
verbs (perform) consist of suffixes –s/-es, -ed and –ing in the inflected forms
(performs, performed, performing); while irregular verbs (give) can vary from being
inflected with suffixes such as –en (given) to changing the vowels (gave). In addition,
auxiliary be has eight grammatical forms (am, is are, was, were, being, been, be). In
Standard English, inflection is frequent as it takes an important role in
morphosyntactic contrasts in number, person and tense.
Table 9: Morphosyntax in SE
Syntactic context
Form
Plural or first/second person present tense, infinitive
love, give
Third person singular present tense
loves, gives
Past tense
loved, gave
Progressive participle
loving, giving
Perfect participle, passive participle
loved, given
In Cantonese, the morphosyntactic system of inflection is much simpler than that of
English. According to Matthews and Yips (1994), Cantonese is an isolating language
which has little, or even not any inflection. Generally, there are rarely any suffixes
showing contrasts in number, person and tense. Those contrasts are normally reflected
by other elements in the phrases. The first/second/third person distinctions rely on the
names or the contexts. The plurality may be expressed by the suffix –deih attaching to
the pronouns. Contrasts in tense can refer to the adverbials such as yesterday, always,
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now, last year, at that time. Aspects can be expressed by some aspect markers, which
mark the state of action. They usually come between verbal compounds, precede or
follow the verb; but they are not absolutely obligatory.
As there is a range of contrasts between the two verbal systems, there may be
structural transfer from Cantonese to English. Actually, some previous studies such as
Gisborne(2002) has reported that, in the spoken English from the Hong Kong
database of International Corpus of English the base form of the verb is widely used
when inflections are necessary in the grammatical contexts. Also, speakers may be
uncertain about the exponence of those features in morphosyntactic marking and
overgeneralize the use of suffixes. In the current data of blogging, there are examples
showing the corresponding features of leveling in morphosyntactic feature system of
Hong Kong English.
In examples (35), the verb does not show third person feature
marking. Cantonese does not distinguish a plural from a third person singular in
present tense by changing the morphemes of a verb. So, some people may omit an –s
or –es after a third person singular. In (36), when the bloggers were commenting or
reporting what happened in their days, the past tense form is absent. The absence of
inflection has spread from omitting the suffixes –s for person in (35) and omitting the
suffix –ed/-d for tense in (36) to the irregular infection of vowel change for tense in
(37a) and form change for tense in (37b). This may prove that the variation of
inflection is not only phonologically distinct by dropping the final consonant
regarding –s and –ed/-d, but it is also a morphologically influence. Furthermore, in
(38a), instead of using the perfect participle ‘eaten’ as the complement of Have, the
blogger used the past tense form of the verb followed by the suffix –d. In (38h), the
blogger also added the suffix –ed to irregular inflection for the past tense. These two
examples show that Hong Kong people have noticed the morphosyntactic markings
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but they have also overgeneralised them. In example (39), there are some variations in
the perfect forms. In English, when there is a sequence of actions, the first action is in
perfect tense while the subsequent action remains a simple past or simple present. But,
in Cantonese, there is no indication or inflection marking of the aspect in the verb
itself; and aspect markers are used instead of auxiliary verbs ‘have’ or ‘had’. So, it is
likely that some Hong Kong people may omit the auxiliary verbs, as in (39a) and in
(39b). Some Hong Kong people may even reserve the base form in perfect context, as
in (39c-d).
(35)
a. If any classmate want to change the time slot with me please call me at
98055026,
b. My mom should thanks you … but now she start to stop me eating!!
(36)
a. I was quite surprised when my mother school rejected me but another
10 times better school welcome me,
b. some students complain tat I told lies.
(37)
a. i finally dig out my Chinese input software CDR
b. this is such a working day
(38)
a.
Have ated my favourite Salmon Salad…
b.
Reli wanted to cry, I felted very very tired ar…
(39)
a.
after I had dinner with my family last nite, I felt more sick
b.
but well the ideas of having a relaxing n crazy night gone impossible
ever since I stepped into the bar
c.
But I still wonder if they really learn anything
d.
Recently I learn two phrases
The above examples from the data have proved that Hong Kong bloggers have
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simplified the morphosyntax of verbs by either using base form in both past and
present tense or using the regular suffices –ed/-d on irregular verbs. These structural
phenomena are commonly present in different genres of English written by Hong
Kong people. Specifically, three distributional features regarding the variations in
verb inflections are discovered in blogging and they are considered to be specific in
this genre.
5.2.1 The distribution of base form
In the data, bloggers would frequently produce a series of clauses to narrate a series of
events happened in the day, in Standard English past tense should be used consistently
on the main verbs in every clause. However, in (40a-h), the past tense form only
appeared in the first clause of a chain. It seems that once the main verb in the first
clause is inflected to express the past tense, the bloggers become relaxed about the
morphosyntactic features of the remaining main verb(s). Since the first clause has set
up the context of past tense, the bloggers may have overlooked the necessarily of
marking the past tense suffix on other main verbs in the following clauses. This
feature could be distinct in blogging because the genre provides a narrative account
packed with many events about a blogger’s daily life at once.
(40)
a. i kept all the kids who couldn’t pass at lunch time and force them to
learn all the ten words appeared in the quiz b4
b. I marked abt 6 news report, 10 short writing, record the marks of a
class’s short writing and the marks for news report, plan my lessons for
tmr, and issue green papers for 2 classes
c. Couldn’t sleep for long and wake up at 12 noon…sigh
d. Thanks for everyone who fought the grade for me and worry about me
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e. I was shocked this morning when I wake up.
f.
And the most important thing was that we have to carry our bags in the
boat rides
g. Afternoon, ate tsui wah together hohohohoho mei~~~ love the soup
drink it all
h. And we managed to go to terminal 1, which was, again the farest, and
get the boarding pas at about 2:40
5.2.2 Fronting a sentence with a verb inflected by -ing
In (41a-e), one would expect the finite past tense form of verbs in each sentence,
instead of the non-finite active participle of verb. The bloggers seemed to narrow the
gap between different forms of verb. Instead, they used the active participles in every
grammatical context. It is known that Cantonese grammar lacks distinctions of verb
forms in different tenses: that is, the notions past, present and future are not encoded
grammatically by forms of the verb. Influenced by such Cantonese features, Hong
Kong people may tend to take away the distinctions. One of the strategies is to use
base forms widely, as mentioned before. Another strategy is in this current discussion,
bloggers would inflect the verb with –ing without any forms of auxiliary be. So, the
finiteness is not shown in the verb phrase since the active participles are non-finite. So,
the distinctions of verb forms are reduced. In addition, it seems that the bloggers
adopt this strategy only when there is time adverbial in the clause; such as ‘last night’
in (41a), ‘today’ in (41b), ‘tonight’ in (41c) and ‘Yesterday’ in (41d). The bloggers
relied on the time adverbials to indicate the time of the events and the tenses. With
this kind of indication, the bloggers were encouraged to reduce the finiteness of the
verb forms. In short, the distinctions are reduced with every verb inflected by the
same suffix –ing. Also, it is possible that such illegal inflection is promoted as it
resembles the legal use of gerundive phrase, as a noun phrase fronting a sentence.
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(41)
a. Having dinner with my dearest friend Ting Ting last night.
b. Being sexually harassed early in the morning today
c. Being extremely ridiculous n unreasonable to u tonight~
d. Yesterday..Reviewing the photos of few years ago…reli felt that I was so
think and weak at that time!!
e. feeling so gloomy at the weekends
5.2.3 Overuse of perfect form
In both the previous research and this study, it was found that Hong Kong people tend
to omit the inflection marking in perfect participles or to omit the auxiliary ‘have’ or’
had’. Surprisingly, it is also found that in the data the auxiliary ‘have’ of present
perfect were used in the contexts of simple past tense, as in (42a-d). In the examples,
simple past tense should be used in the native variety. It could prove that Hong Kong
people have acquired and maintained the morphosyntactic features of perfect forms,
but they may be uncertain about using those features in the right contexts. These
findings also point out that the problems may spread from blurring the distinctions
between morphosyntactic markings to misunderstanding the functions between simple
past tense and present prefect tense.
(42)
a. I hv dinner with Colin tonight… Hv tried a Japanese restaurant at Langham
Place…Great!! Hv had a long chat about man tonight.
b. I have watched Ching Yu’s concert on 8/5…
c. There is 15% discount at the commercial Press As a result, I have bought
two books for learning English.
d. Especially when I saw the nice stuff that lily n mabel ve shown me
tonight~~geogeous~really great ar!!!!!
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5.3 HKECMC features
In the data, it is found that bloggers have shared the CMC Hong Kong English
features identified in other CMC genres (emails, ICQ dialogues, MSN dialogues) by
previous research (Poon 2005, Lee 2002, Bolton 2002). The features, including End of
sentence particles, Romanised Cantonese and Literal translation of Cantonese to
English, will be revealed one by one below.
5.3.1 End of sentence Particles
According to the data, Cantonese sentence-final particles are the most likely to be
Romanized in blogging. The bloggers use these Romanized Cantonese particles to
express their tones in Hong Kong English. Although blogging does not have a high
profile of socially interaction, bloggers still find their ways to express their feelings
and attitudes towards the daily incidences on top of the literal meaning of a particular
sentence. The Romanized Cantonese particles are often at the final position of an
English sentence. In example (43a), the blogger used Cantonese particle “law”
(corresponding to the Cantonese definitive particle “lok” saying “that’s the way it is”)
to indicate the impatience and a lack of choices about going to the farthest gate. In
(43b), the Romanzied Cantonese particle “la” (corresponding to the Cantonese
particle “la” which emphasizes a point) was used to emphasize the certainty of having
asked questions. In (43c), the blogger used Romanised Canontese particle “lae”
(corresponding to the Cantonese question particle “le” meaning ‘what about?’) in
the rhetorical question. On the other hand, although blogging is open to public and
generally it is not written for a specific reader, bloggers would sometimes leave a
message in their entry for a specific individual such as a particular close friend of
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them. In case of this interaction, Romanised Cantonese particles are used to soften the
tone and this could reduce the distance between the writer and the target reader, as in
(43d-e). Table 10 is a list of Romanized Cantonese particles in the data.
(43)
a. but CX had the flight to us boarding at gate 48 which is the farest gate law!!!!
b. Of course I asked them questions la~
c. Assignment lae…nothing much was done honestly…haha
d. fan, guess what is it la I think u can guess gei
e. hope you will get well soon la mabel
Table 10: A list of Romanized Cantonese final particles in blogging
Coined
Target Examples from the data
Romanized
Particle
ah
呀
Went to Macau again…lost money ah this time
(disapproving or ah
surprised)
ar
啊/呀
Reli wanted to cry, I felted very very tired ar…give
(assertion and a/a
me a break
exclamation)
ga
架
Well I use the rainbow lucky draw in other classes
(assertion
of ga/g as well ga! Not especially for 4D ga!
facts)
a
gei
既
fan, guess what is it la I think u can guess gei
(assertion with ge
a
sense
of
uncertainty)
la
啦
i think really no need to rush la plenty of time la
(assertion and la/la
emphasize)
law
囉
but CX had the flight to us boarding at gate 48
(irrevocability)
lok
which is the farest gate law!!!!
lae/le/lei
呢
…wow…Fiona is so fit le..
(question
/ ne/l
exclamation)
e
we can check it out together lei
but y cant I make it better for everyone le?
lu
(assertion and
disappointment)
ga la
(assertion and
evaluation)
ga ma
(assertion and
exclamation)
o路
lu
架啦
gala
how can I expect the senior citizens to run with m
to the date lei?
failed the cso interview lu
te vice-principal said ‘you guys have your own
note-book ga la, no need to borrow from us.’
架 嘛 i got quite food results in when i was there ga ma
gam and i wasn’t a bad student at all
a
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Generally, the above examples show that the particles were used by bloggers
according to their functions in terms of speech acts. There could be another reason for
the Romanization. That is, while bloggers were typing a whole piece of English entry,
they may not want to put extra efforts to install or shift to process the Cantonese
characters. So, they would rather Romanize them in spelling to replace Cantonese
character representations. However, this phenomenon is not exclusive to every
blogger: even though the particles are useful in expressing tones, bloggers would have
their individual preference for using the Romanised Cantonese particles. Table 11
shows that Participants B and G, who are undergraduate students, used Romanised
Cantonese particles more frequently than the graduates in the working class. And the
two postgraduate students in the group did not use any Romanized Cantonese
particles. It seems that Hong Kong people in the older age groups or with higher
education background would avoid using Romanised Cantonese particles. It may be
related to the negative attitude towards the variety in Hong Kong. According to the
self-report from Poon (2005), the participants referred Romanised Cantonese as a
feature of “Chinglish” or “Hong Kong English” and they regarded such variety of
English as “a kind of English mis-used by local students who are incapable of using
standard English” (Poon, 2005:32). Due to the constraints of the social norms, Hong
Kong people identify the variety as “bad English”. Since Romanised Cantonese is
such a typical feature of Hong Kong English, it is rather possible that the more
sophisticated English users in Hong Kong would avoid using them deliberately.
Table 11: The use of Romanized particles among bloggers
Participant No.
of Education
Career
tokens for Background
using
Romanized
Cantonese
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A
B
particles
3
10
C
D
3
0
E
0
F
G
13
19
H
2
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University graduate
Undergraduate
student
University graduate
University graduate
Postgraduate
student
University graduate
Undergraduate
student
University graduate
English Teacher
Undergraduate Student
Nurse
Postgraduate Student +
General Skill Trainer
Postgraduate Student in
the States
Office Assistance
Undergraduate Student
Executive
5.3.2 Romanized Cantonese
Apart from the particles, some short expressions of Romanized Cantonese are also
found in the data. They are Cantonese expressions being phonologically translated
into Romanized forms. Most of the expressions actually origin from low Cantonese.
Under the local classic diglossic conditions in Hong Kong, there are high Cantonese
which has been under the exonormic influence of Modern Mandarin; and Low
Cantonese which has not been under any exonormic control and exhibits all the
divergence features relative to Modern Mandarin (So, 1989). Bloggers tend to choose
the more localized low Cantonese as the source of Romanization, some examples
from the data are ‘ho mei’ (Cantonese “hou meih” meaning “very delicious”, ‘C
LAI’ (Cantonese “si naaih” meaning “uneducated housewives who gossip
around”) and ‘chaai si’ (Cantonese “choh si” meaning “step on the shit”), as in
(44a-c) respectively. They are terms of low Cantonese translated into some interesting
spellings which are absent in the native-speaker variety. Table 12 summarizes all the
Romanized items identified in the data.
(44)
a. Afternnon, ate tsui wah together hohohohoho mei~~~love the soup
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b. the other day I heard some C LAI gossiping in the sauna room
c. I hv told you tat u chaai si!
Table 12: A list of Romanized Cantonese expressions in the data
Romanized Target
Cantonese Example from data
expression expression
yam cha
飲
茶
went yam cha yesterday w/
yam chah
my ar mar yesterday
‘drinking tea, chatting and
eating dim sum’
ar mar
ah por
mo liu
阿 女麻
a mah
‘grandma’
阿 婆
a poh
‘an old lady’
無
聊
mouh liuh
‘nonsense’
went yam cha yesterday w/
my ar mar yesterday
dun laugh at me, i m really
like a ah por now
but I dun y Ss like responding
to these Ss’ silly yelling…hey,
these mo liu Ss r ur obstacle
in ur learning
精
神
jing sahn
‘spirit’
wan choi fei 幻采翡翠
chu
(a name of a dessert)
jing san
利
是
leih sih
‘red packet’ (in Chinese New
Year)
Kung
Hei 恭喜發財
Fat Choi
(an expression to wish people
luck in Chinese New Year)
ho
好
hou
‘very’
lei si
jing san jing san jing san,
I’m strong
the wan choi fei chu is not
really nice tonight, cos it’s
bitter
I have got about $700 ‘lei si’
there…
Hi everybody!! Balated Kung
Hei Fat Choi! Finally got
online here…
ho sleepy ar
5.3.3 Literal translation of Cantonese to English
Literal translation of Cantonese to English is another common feature of Hong Kong
English in the CMC contexts including blogging. This kind of direct transliteration is
not common in the blogging but it is interesting to note that, in the data most of the
direct transliterations were put in quotation marks by bloggers. This may suggest that
bloggers are actually aware of the difference between this CMCHKE feature and the
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standard variety of English. Also, the expressions are very localized vocabulary, so it
is likely that only people who share the same sociolinguistic background would
understand them. For example, in (45a) ‘free travellers’ (Cantonese ‘jihyauh hahng
leuihhaak’, with ‘jihyauh hahng’ meaning ‘free travel’ and ‘leuihhaak’
meaning ‘visitors’) are individual visitors who are residents from the Mainland China
and are allowed to visit Hong Kong for a short period with a special permit under the
“one country, two systems” political concept. In (45b), ‘jump building machine’
(Cantonese ‘tiu lau gei’, with ‘tiu’ meaning ‘jump’, ‘lau’ meaning ‘building’
and ‘gei’ meaning ‘machine’) is a direct translation because Hong Kong people use
the figurative meaning of ‘jumping down from the roof of a building’ to image the
motion of drop-ride in a theme park. Other examples as such are summarized in Table
13.
(45)
a. I went to TST yesterday full of rude ‘free travelers’
b. Tried the ‘jump building machine’ the whole process was so fast
Table 13: Examples of morpheme-for-morpheme translation in the data
Example
Target
Example from the data
expression
one sword kill die 一劍殺死佢地
Most of my kids.. I jux want to
them
(an idiomatic way to say: I really want to “one
express anger)
sword kill die them”
left body
左邊
身
stiffed left body
jobin
san
left-handed body
‘the left part of the body’
die fire
死
火
Drove quite well today, at last
seI fo
not even any ‘die fire’
die
fire
‘stalling the car’
messy
burial 亂葬崗
managed to arrive the the
place
(an idiomatic way to LAS airport but what I saw
express the mess)
was really a ‘messy burial
place’
fake man
假
人
The setting was so great and
ngaihjouh yahn
in fact there were boxes and
fake
man
some ‘fake man’ on the sides
‘model’
of the theatre
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5.4. A comparison with other informal text types in Hong Kong
This part briefly generates the distinct distributions of the HKE variations in blogging,
MSN dialogues and casual conversations. Particularly, the descriptions will be based
on the above analysis on topicalisation, morphosyntax on verbs and HKECMC
features. The following discussions show that having compared the HKE features in
blogging with those in daily conversations and MSN dialogues, the variations have
spread across a range of informal texts but not every type of variations is universal.
5.4.1 Variations of topicalisation in the informal contexts
According to the supplementary data, it is less likely to find most of the identified
Hong Kong English features of topicalisation in daily conversations. There are two
occurrences of variations in Circumstances Topicalisation, as in (46a-b). In (46a), the
topic indicates the circumstances (‘in the account courses’) to which the predicate
‘there are many beautiful girls’ applies. The form in Standard English should be “there
are many beautiful girls in the account courses”. In (46b), ‘now’ states the
circumstances in which the sentence is to be understood. The time expression “now”
is topicalised but it should not be the subject of the sentence in Standard English. The
standard alternative is “now the school work is quite fine”. Based on the small-scale
data, in terms of topicalisation, there are not many variations in English conversations
among Hong Kong people. Indeed, in conversations most of the sentences are
topicalised with the doers (subjects) of the actions, comparing with blogging.
(46)
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a.
b.
Year of Presentation: 2007
f: … account subject have many beautiful girl
i: So how’s your school work
h: um now is quite fine
In contrast, corresponding to the observation in blogging, the occurrence of Verb
Topicalisation is frequent in online instant messaging. In this CMC context, Hong
Kong people are more likely to drop personal pronouns in the subject positions and
have the verb topicalised, as in (47a-d). Also, dummy subjects are often omitted in
front of raising verbs ‘seem’, as in (47d).
(47)
a.
b: has he/she found u?
a: received an email lor
b.
c: … understood the flight schedule part already or not?
c.
d: wanna ask wht is ur ans of q4c
d.
a: i guess they arrange the schedule of counseling
b: seems hai the counselor arrange it themselves
Apart from the above findings, another hardly observed variation of topicalisation in
the data of both daily conversations and MSN dialogues is Verbal Noun Phrase
Topicalisation, as in (48a) from the conversation data and in (49a) from the MSN
data.
(48)
a.
f: study account have a good future
(49)
a.
d: include pk of airplane in flight instance is ok?
Based on the comparisons, there is an interesting observation about the variation of
verb topicalisation. With the nature of self-expression in blogging, one-to-one
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communication in MSN dialogues, and face-to-face contact in daily conversations;
one would expect a high profile of self-identification applies on all the three text types
and a frequent occurrence of verb topicalisation in all the three text types. However,
the result of the comparisons show that the omission of subjects frequently appears in
the two CMC contexts, but it rarely applies on daily conversations. In fact, economy
can be a possible factor to motivate the CMC users to drop the subjects. In CMC
contexts, since the subjects are understood in most contexts, the subject omissions can
facilitate fast typing within a short period of time in those contexts.
5.4.2 Variations of morphosyntax for verbs in the informal contexts
According to the data, overuse of base forms in past tense context is a common
phenomenon in all the three informal text types under investigation. Examples (50a-c)
illustrate the leveling in morphosyntax of HKE in the data of casual conversations and
(51a) illustrates that in the data of MSN dialogues. So, such kind of leveling in the
morphosyntax of Hong Kong English is quite universal among different genres
produced by Hong Kong people.
(50)
a.
b: … in last few week he has a mock exam…
b.
f: …in the past I think account is a good subject…
c.
h: … because yesterday is the birthday of chiwai’s father…
(51)
a.
f: he was in Guang Xi on Sat… so i finally go back office…
Besides, in the data of MSN dialogues there are a number of cases that inflection
marking –ed has been overused. (52a-c) illustrate that inflected verb forms were used
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after modal verbs and infinitive-to, instead of base form. It seems that Hong Kong
people are more likely to overgeneralize the regular past tense marking –ed (to the
infinitive contexts) in informal writing situations (the current CMC contexts). In fact,
the Cantonese influence of not permitting syllable clusters may discourage such
overgeneralization in informal spoken situations.
(52)
a.
e: …I should revised the Dwg by myself first…
b.
e: …I should required HKE to draft for me…
c.
f: … And far east have to revised their programme incorporating the signage
submission we just made
5.4.3 Variations of CMCHKE features in the informal contexts
In the data of MSN dialogues, the Romanized particle is a speech-act device being
commonly adopted to fulfill the high profile of social interactions in online instant
messaging. In contrast, there is only one example of Romanized particle in the data of
conversations, as in (53a). As mentioned above, due to the lack of intonations in
blogging, end-of-sentence Romanized particles are used to help bloggers express the
tones of the sentences. MSN dialogues share the same disadvantage with other types
of CMC genres and lack those speech-act devices. Therefore, Romanized particle is
one of the very limited devices to help MSN users express their attitudes and thus
they are frequently used in this CMC dialogue. On the other hand, Romanized
particles are rarely found in daily conversations because Hong Kong people can rely
on the intonation, rhythms, eye contact and other body gestures to express their tones
during the speech.
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(53)
a.
c: … he doesn’t want to listen to my sug suggestion la
Comparing the distribution of Romanized particles in the two CMC text types, MSN
users seem to use a larger variety of particles than the bloggers. The following
particles in Table 14 are found in the data of MSN dialogues; they are additional to
those found in blogging. Since online instant messaging is more spontaneous and
socially interactive than blogging, it demands a frequent adoption of Romanized
Cantonese to express the speech acts during the interactions.
Table 14: Additional Romanized Cantonese final particles in MSN dialogues
Coined Romanized Target Examples from the data
Particle
jeh
姐
a: i’m wondering why my counseling so late
(meaning ‘just or je
jeh
only’)
wor
喎
a: really? Our admin is so slow wor
(informative and or wo
surprising discovery)
ga
嘛
e: ha? He was in Guang Xi ma? Did he back
(Question)
ga/g HK yesterday?
a
tim
添
f: but if u ask, then he will do!!!! (quick quick
(meaning ‘too or tim
tim…)
even’)
5.4.4. Limitations of the Comparison
One major limitation of this comparison is the unbalance in the scales of the data
collection. The analysis of HKE in blogging is based on a corpus of 15,892 words, but
the scale in each of the two other informal text types is limited to three sets of data.
Due to this limitation, the descriptions provided in this study may not be
comprehensive enough to reveal the factual information about the structures of HKE
in online instant messaging and daily conversations. Although some distinct examples
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of HKE features can be extracted from all the three text types for qualitative
discussion, the arguments concerning general patterns or distributional descriptions of
those features might not be representative enough.
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Chapter 6 Conclusion
Hong Kong English has been a controversial variety in the sociolinguistic field.
Despite the negative attitudes towards ‘Hong Kong English’ in the local community,
in blogging Hong Kong English is a fairly popular language choice along Cantonese
and Cantonese-English code-switching.
This research serves to describe and explain the structure and use of Hong Kong
English in blogging. This study has identified a number of cases in which Cantonese
has its influence on Hong Kong English. First, the subject omissions and
Topic-Comment
effect
in
Cantonese
have
caused
variations
in
forming
subject-topicalised English sentences. Second, the lack of inflection in Cantonese has
certain effect on simplifying the morphosyntax system in English produced by Hong
Kong people. Third, Romanized particles at the end of English sentences have been
largely transferred from Cantonese. Apart from language contact, there are other
factors
encouraging
the
use
of
HKE
features.
The
characteristics
of
information-packed narrations and self-expressions in blogging have promoted
Verb-Topicalisation. Also, bloggers have created terms of Cantonese-English direct
translations according to the local cultures and politics.
Having compared the use of HKE and CMCHKE in blogging, online instant
messaging and daily conversations; it seems that Hong Kong people deliberately
choose to use some particular features of the local variety in different contexts. For
example, bloggers and MSN users would often drop the subjects and topicalize the
main verbs for economic reasons while in speech Hong Kong people would reserve
the subjects. Also, Hong Kong people would insert Romanized Cantonese words in
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English sentences in the CMC contexts for expressing the tones. However, normally
they do not use this speech-act device in spontaneous conversations. From these
pieces of evidence, it could be suggested that some distinct structures of Hong Kong
English are used intentionally for specific functional reasons. Since the participants in
this study have the ability to use the identified Hong Kong features freely according to
the contexts; those features may not necessarily be the unconscious performance
errors or interlanguage features of second language learners. Rather, they may be the
language properties owned by Hong Kong people to facilitate communication. In case,
further studies concerning the function of the variety can be conducted in order to
investigate to what extent do Hong Kong people vary the selection of certain HKE
features according to the communicative purposes across different genres.
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Appendices
Appendix 1 – A tagged corpus of English entries: data from blogging
<PA0103><date>Wednesday, January 03, 2007<body><> It's good that I got my new high heel shoes
and school bag in the new year. <> I like them. <> I hope they have long life expectancy. <>Yes, I
really like them, especially the high heels cos I like the vintage reddish brown colour. <>***<> happy
bday to my bro. <>the choco Cova cake was nice. <>***< > sorry tat i said "<t>seems no one will hv
his/her bday in the coming week..." <> wahahahaha... <>sorry, I always forget ppl's bday cos I don't
have a habit to remember my bday. <>***< > Friday course this week and next week. <>Teaching
RS/Moral Ed by using stories...sounds an interesting teaching strategy. <>Hope that I can do this: to
learn and to apply for the benefit of mankind. <>*** < >Joe, <>Sorry tat I haven't sent websites to you
cos I can't login to some sites by using the current PC.
<PA0123><date>Tuesday, January 23, 2007<body> < ><t>seems a bit more diligent than the last term
<>at least... i keep my Ss' head down nearly every lesson <><t><v>prepare my lessons seriouly every
lesson<> <t><v>try to make my lesson be more happy (at least i must look happy and delighted in the
school) <>and started marking the first news report (marked 8, 5 of them dun have a margin, 5 of them
directly copy things from the news article!!!!!!!!! i think i should do sth today)< > <v>but i still
wonder if they really learn anything<> <t>just finished the writing notes <>phew! < > time to take a
shower and rush to school<>***< > last min msg: <>well... life is tough suddenly <>cos i tried to be
independent
<PA0128><date>Sunday, January 28, 2007<body><><t>parents day, preparing wut i should talk to the
parents. <>hope tat i won't become a frozen chicken in the classroom.< ><t>went to the AIA carnival,
well...i can still manage those extreme rides, thx God. <>but when i was on the rides, i jux thought of
the accidents abt rides appeared on Cosmo Girl UK issues before. and i kept on comforting myself tat i
can die w/ my bf, not tat bad.< >ok, back to the hell, still 6 Ss' comment to go.
<PA0131><date>Wednesday, January 31, 2007<body><> parents day last sunday made me dead. <>i
sat from 8am-2pm. <>my back was broken after such a long meeting. <>i collapsed at once when i saw
a bed.<> monday<> i couldn't remember wut i did<> cos i was too tired<> tuesday <>staff
development <>sat still frm 8am-3:30pm again<> u know, <t>ask an old lady w/ low back pain to sit
for 2 days is not a good idea. <><t>ask an old lady w/ low back pain and who's in M period to sit for 2
days is really a stupid idea. <>she'll just die or get piss on others. <> i chose to die on my bed again last
night.< > fxxk tat i found i forgot to write my book report now <>the deadline is today.
<PA0219><date>Monday, February 19, 2007<body> <><t> finally fixed the wireless broadband but i
think the reciever is really sucks. no signal box always pop-up. <>school life...was crazy before the
holiday. <t>most of my kids... i jux want to say: i really want to <c>"one sword kill die them" (direct
translation, <t>just like wut my kids wrote in their writing) <>i was crazy b4 the holiday cos less than
10 kids passed a quiz (total 33 kids). i kept all the kids who couldn't pass at lunch time and <v>force
them to learn all the ten words appeared in the quiz b4 they went for lunch. <t>the next day i scolded
the whole class again and all teachers were scared when they passed by my classroom. they never
think tat i can scold them so angrily, loudly and clearly w/o using a microphone and they all knew tat
my kids r really RUBBISH (as the NET said) <> haha, i still remember wut the NET said to me one day
after having a lesson in my class <>NET: are there many rubbish in your class? <> ME: -_-lll err... (you
mean... many rubbish on the floor... or many rubbish on the chairs? actually... BOTH, i think) <>ME:
sorry? <>NET: there are many rubbish! they never care about anything! never use english never listen
to you... they just dun care! <>ME: -_-lll errr...yes... <>NET: i am sorry about you! you have to see
them every day! <>ME: -_-lll eeer...yes... i scold them every day...ah ha ha ha... -_-lll <> well, i got
the most terrible class in the school. <>but i always comfort myself, i was not the poorest when
comparing with my friends in band 3 schools. <>hm... in fact, i m teaching in a so-called band 1
school. i can't imagine y they... well... i shouldn't call my kids rubbish but some of them are really
RUBBISH!!!!!!!!!!!!! they never treasure wut they got and they should go to band 3 schools and be
beaten by the triads! <> well... my new year target: <>don't bring anything unhappy at school back
home. <> so i'd better stop thinking wut's the hell was going on in all my classes. <>***<>
<t>valentine's day... i kept all the kids after school to learn the ten words again... stop thinking abt it. <>
dashed back to TKO and had an early sushi dinner after school. then went to the flower market in TKO.
<> no flowers, no gift, no candlelit dinner. <>tat's wut i want for the valentine's day. <> i hope next year
will be the last dinning-out valentine's day. <>*** <> CNY, the festival i hate most. <>my mum, the
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woman i hate most. <> suddenly, i am afraid of losing my dad one day.<> <t>went yam <c>cha
yesterday w/ my ar mar yesterday. she was sooooooo energetic... <t>no need to use the
wheelchair!!! well... i duno if it's good or not... u know, my grandma is now 97 and suddenly be so
energetic and hyper...well... <>***<> i think the holiday is too short for me.
<PA0219><date>Monday, February 19, 2007<body> <>Honey Baby, <>When will u be free?
<>gimme a call <>actually i'll call u tmr. <>Honey Bady <> PS. well... i hv told you tat u <c>chaai si!
<PA0220><date>Tuesday, February 20, 2007<body><>well... wireless broadband... no difference with
56K sometimes.<><t>start marking F1 Composition. my working efficiency... is like the F4 listening
tape: S-L-O-W S-T-A-R-T. <>hope that i can KO them tonight. <> <t>will go shopping and hv dinner
with honey baby on thursday. <>Haha
<PA0221><date> Wednesday, February 21, 2007<body> <> kids, think about it. <>now, u dun hv to go
to school <>tat means u hv 8 more hours a day to do your work. <>do you think u will read the book
seriously after the school starts? <> u'll hv HW and testsssss and quizzesssssssssss as well after 26/2!
<>dun tell me i have to go here and there and do this and that in the holiday. <> holiday is not really
holiday for F4 - 7 students, dun be silly. <>use your time wisely. <> PS. I have to finish reading the 3
books within this holiday + tons of marking. <>*** <> well...my grandma... i've told u guys tat too
energetic is not good <>today she <v>is sent to the ER cos she was fallen onto the ground and hurt
herself. <>thanks god. <t>not serious.
<PA0223><date> Friday, February 23, 2007<body><> work count <><t>KO F1 writing FINALLY
<><t>KO the last polar bear and half of the great football stories <> but... <>Still 80 F4 long writing,
80 F4 list task 6, 40 F4 news report, 3 minutes <>WTF! <> ***<> tho i've got tons to do, i still <v>flee
to meet my friends <> i went to TST yesterday <><t>full of rude <c>'free travellers' <><t>bought 1 tee
in quiksilver for my bf,<t>bought 1 interesting scarf in LCX, <t>bought a pair of pants and a tee for
work at giodano<>but i didn't use my credit card, haha<> honey baby found it was amazing tat i had so
much cash to pay <>well... haha... cos my new goal for this year is: stop using credit card to shop <>
dun laugh at me, i m really like a <c>ah por now <>cos when i <v>do my financial plan, i found tat i
always use this month's salary to pay for the last month's credit bill...tat's stupid i think... if i get fired
suddenly, how can i pay the nix bill???!?!!?! <> ***<>alright, <t>happy for a day means it's killing for
today. <> back to the hell of marking
<PA0223><date>Friday, February 23, 2007<body> <> F4 Kids, <> I've talked to many of my friends
these days. They also think no matter when I give you the work, u guys will find many
excuses. <>Well... let's compromise.<> Do you guys think it's fair to break the reading journal into 2
parts to hand in? <> I assigned 2 parts mainly for each book. <> The great football stories<> Part One:
complete exercise of the book<> Part Two: complete all the questions on the notes (the notes with a
book list) The last polar bear<>Part One: write 5 reply letters <>Part Two: complete all the questions on
the notes (the notes with a book list) <>Sherlock Holmes Investigates <>Part One: complete the
exercise I assigned to you in the book <>Part Two: complete all the questions on the notes (the notes
with a book list) <> On 26/2, I'll collect the reading journal and all guys must finish Part One at least.
<> We'll choose another deadline of Part Two. <> Is it better and fair? <> Please spread out the news to
your friends and i'll contact Joe to help me organise u guys to spread the news out <> But don't forget to
complete the 2 reading papers SERIOUSLY
<PA0225> <date> Sunday, February 25, 2007 <body> <>f4 kids,<>just bear in your mind:<>except the
questions on the note with a book list that you dun hv to do, u hv to hand in rest of the things that i
mentioned in the F/M lesson on 26/2.<>pls help me to call that 9 students<>cos i m really busy <>busy
on PMP
<PA0225><date> Sunday, February 25, 2007<body><t>finished 2 holmes stories<><t>finished one
pile of F4 Paper 2 task 6 marking<><t>marking F4 news report<>threw the clothes that i won't wear
anymore (well... i really think i m wasting the world's resources... no matter the clothes or food......)
<><t>cleaned my room's floor (<c>"ah shun" style cleaning, my mum never let me use a floor mop to
clean the floor) <><t>gonna start typing the 3 minutes<>***<>i've been searching for the red ink pen
tat i usually use for marking round the stationary shops in Metro City for a month, but i still can't get
one! <>I have a very strong bad feeling: i'll be bad luck in my work this year. Will Mr Save Rich fire
me on July? <>My bf said i m *insane*.<>***<>i get <v>pissed on my bf today cos of the "changing
my mind on SBA holiday homework" incident. <>he said i m unfair to those who <v>finish the work.
(then i dug out hundreds of things to get pissed on, like my PC, xanga, dating time, chatting time or
even fill in the blank . and funniest was tat... when we were still fighting and showing our black face to
each other, v met his ex... hahahahahahahahahahahaha...) <>well... back to the issue. <>in fact... most
students hadn't started their work when i changed my mind<>and i didn't say they dun hv to hand in
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Part 2<>if Ss has finished the 2 parts already, that means they'll hv less workload. <>So... wut's the
point of saying tat i m unfair to those students. <>in fact, it's the Ss and my bf are unfair to
me. -__-lll<>***<><t>tmr... no time to work. so i must finish wut i want to finish tonight .
<>***<><t>watched Queer Eyes tonight the days before<>one is abt helping a guy to plan a
suprise engagement<>one is abt helping a guy to plan a suprise wedding banquet<>i shed my tears after
watching them, they're so touching. <>and i really love the western wedding banquet more than the
chinese wedding dinner<>cos i like the speeches from the couple and their parents, the guests can move
around and dance and hv their buffet, the couple dun hv to busy for changing their clothes and showing
off their jewellery<>i didn't hv strong feeling when i went to my relatives or friend's wedding, i jux
thought the couple must be v tired<>well... anyway, i hope no one will mention tat i'll get married in the
next year, tat's not true and impossible. <>***<>WARNING: PMS<>beware of Miss Fung on Mon<>
<PA0227><date>Tuesday, February 27, 2007<body><>memorial day<>i seldom use IT stuffs in my
lessons cos i think my sch's IT is really sucks<>I really hate to use the staff room's PC. slow,
<t>always hv network problem, <t>always hv virus, <t>always hang, and my memory stick always has
virus cos i hv to put it into the PC every day. <>and i used PCto play a video clip in F2 today. my
student showed me the mouse and my response was :O<>the wireless mouse had no batteries in
it.... -_-lllllll <><t>lucky tat the student <v>knows how to use fast keys<>it's also the first time i used
PPT in my teaching. this gave me butterflies in my stomach cos i worried tat the PC would be out of
order and couldn't support my memory stick. in the lesson, i strongly felt tat i was like a fool cos i was
not used to using PPT in CSWCSS. i REALLY appreciate my students who helped me to set the things
up. <>well... i wonder if Ss like to use PPT in learning or not. <>***<>well, i should be
target-oriented<>i must work hard
<PA0227><date>Tuesday, February 27, 2007<body><>14 months<>i m so happy
<PA0301><date> Thursday, March 01, 2007 <body> <>i m too low efficient<>i <v>wanna go home
earlier to write the minutes but i stayed at sch for 2 hr at last. <>i marked abt 6 news report, 10 short
writing, <v>record the marks of a class's short writing and the marks for news report, <v>plan my
lessons for tmr, and <v>issue green papers for 2 classes. <>i must mark faster. <>***<><t>died on my
bed right after dinner<><t>n finally woke up at 4:30<><t>now writing the staff meeting minutes<>i
hate this work<>nth related to teaching<>i always wonder y can't ask a sec frm the general office to do
it? <>i think one of the duty tat a sec should do is to take minutes<>***<><t>today's lessons... i think
they're q smooth<>i never expected i could finished 80% of my plan today as each period was only 35
min today<>thx for Ss' cooperation, esp F.4<>the main reason tat the lessons could run smoothly was
the annoying Ss were sleeping in the lesson<>well... i tend to not waking up those Ss now, cos they r
selfish and annoying<>they always drag the teaching and learning schedule of teachers and other
Ss<>they r unfair to others<>but i duno y Ss like responding to these Ss' silly yelling... hey, these mo
liu Ss r ur obstacle in ur learning, y u guys bother to interact w/ them??! <>not waking up those Ss
doesn't mean i m not a responsible teacher<>i also need to protect other Ss' right on learning<>i see no
pt to waste time on those rubbish and give up other potential Ss
<PA0303><date>Saturday, March 03, 2007<body> <>holiday<>well...today i really want a holiday, so
i didn't go back to sch. <>i went to have a check-up AGAIN this morning. well... i understand that wut
i've got is can't be cured unless i dun hv stress. <>haha, while i was waiting to have the check-up, i
marked a dozen news report. i worked so efficiently there. should i go there every
weekend? ha...jk... i want to stay healthy. <><t>watched <open season> , a very short children film,
but it's fun. i laughed louder than the children in the house. <><t>then went SHOPPING. i got a
nice shoulder bag, my friend got a nice stripe polo shirt and a pair of white-red air force. We're both
happy. <>it's good tat i got adidas "sponser". i can save a lot in causal clothes. good. <>***<>F5 Ss
finished their last formal class on Fri. They thanked their teachers in the morning assembly. i felt
so touching cos i also have their experience. i know how they feel and i know wut they fear. tho i
didn't teach them, i really hope they can come back again. <>they make me reflect on my teaching
again. i hope next year, my class won't say: "thank miss fung, we felt so refresh in her lessons cos we
could sleep nicely when she was teaching..." <>i really wonder wut my students could learn from
me. i'm such a disorganised teacher... i can't stand myself sometimes...how can my Ss stand me?
hahahaha... God's know. <>***<>some Ss <v>complain tat i told lies. <>well... do you know y
i suddenly remember some Ss' number? to be frank, i didn't remember most Ss' number b4 cos i couldn't
finish marking Ss' work in the 1st term, <t>but this term, i mark q a lot. and the key reason is...haha...
cos they always forget to hand-in my homework, they always sleep in my lessons, they always produce
some great work, they always produce some rubbish... <>teacher <v>remember Ss's name or number, 2
reasons<>1. the S is too smart
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2. the S is too naughty<><t>for the color stuff... if u come to check my lucky draw wood, u'll know
how i organised them: <>i just arranged them as rainbow spectrum then wrote the numbers one by one.
<>and last time, just 3 Ss left w/o being questioned... of course i asked them questions <c>la~ <>well,
i use the rainbow lucky draw in other classes as well <c>ga! not especially for 4D <c>ga!
<PA0304><date>Sunday, March 04, 2007<body><> i was lying on a bed and thinking of how to
motivate my kids tmr in the lessons. i'm going to teach adverb and comparative and superlative form
of adverb tmr. but the boring Longman Focus... made me fell asleep. i'm sure my boys <v>is going
to fall asleep as well tmr if i jux directly read out the written rubbish on tat book. hahahahahaha...
<>maybe i should keep them busy and use my rainbow "lucky" draw to wake them up.
<>***<>prehaps... i should have a tea to energise myself... hot and spicy calbee chips, what a good
tea!! crunch crunch crunch...
<PA0309><date>Friday, March 09, 2007<body><>no motivation to work<>so cold<>many
markings<>procrasinated minutes<>scolding students<>principal observations<>panel
observation<>scolding students<>lesson planning<>motivate students<>scolding students<>scolding
students<>many people asked if 1A is troublesome<>well... they don't steal, they don't fight, they are
not gangsters<>but they don't hand in HW, don't follow teachers' instructions, don't do revision, don't
clean the classroom, don't write their handbook, don't bring their brain and heart to school... <>well..
stealing fighting and being a gangster won't happen all day and every day<>but the small problems
happen EVERY DAY EVERY MINUTE in 1A<>i just want to have peace w/ all my students<>i
always tell them they hv to be considerate<>but they never have this sense
<PA0311><date>Sunday, March 11, 2007<body> <>another week is coming<>a bit depressed<>cos i
feel sick<>physically sick and mentally sick<>grey face green face white lips purple lips<>yelling
pissing murmuring scolding <><c> jing san jing san jing san<>i m strong. <>PS. take care in macau.
take care in hong kong. <>(the <c>wan choi fei chu <v>is not really nice tonight, cos it's
bitter. looking forward to the next <c>wan choi fei chu)
<PA0315><date> Thursday, March 15, 2007<body><> okok... i finally <v>dig out my chinese input
software CDR<>i AM GOING to install it NOW!
<PB0102><date>Tuesday, January 02, 2007<body><>07-1-1<>2:00-4:00 tuition<>Dinner with Kit
and his family members....um...I am not good at socialing with strangers. <>07-1-2<>Sigh..this <v>is
such a working day. <>10-12 Sam<>12-1 Eric <>4:20-5:30 Cousin <>6-7 Ivan <>it ended up that i
wasted the whole day yet I only earned a litlle...
<PB0105><date> Friday, January 05, 2007<body><> Sometimes I am asking myself: <>I am actually
doing what the housewives doing in those banks, the only difference is.. <>they do it insde the bank, as
a groups, with sharing, with accented Cantonese, <>I do it quitely at home.
<PB0117><date>Wednesday, January 17, 2007<body><> If I really go back to St Rose of Lima, I
might come across my tutiee, Vivian. <>its' definitely odd when my tutee suddenly becomes my
student. <>I was quite disapoointed that my mother school didn't allow me to be the student teacher
there.....i got quite good results in when i was there <c>ga ma and i wasn't a bad student at all. <>I was
quite surprised when my mother school rejected me but another 10 times better school <v>welcome me,
wow wow wow.
<PB0117><date>Wednesday, January 17, 2007<body><> Mabel's AEP 6 changes from Fri afternoon to
Tuesday afternoon. That means we will be having two day-off in this semester.<>Honestly, i really want
to start AEP ealier but <t>seems that other classmates cherish their lunch time very much. It's okay, not
every one needs to support their own school fees and own spendings by himself/herself. <>Sigh, other
classamtes think that I earn a lot and I'm mad about my tuitions.... <>However, for me, every tuition is
esstential , I can't afford to lose anyone. <>SO... <>If any classmate <v>want to change the time slot
with me (Wed 12:30-3:30, Tue 2:30-5:30) please do call me at 98055026, a thousand thanks from
you.<$><$><><$>
<PB0203><date>Saturday, February 03, 2007<body><> I found that i am 1 pound heavier! Jesus!
<PB0207><date>Wednesday, February 07, 2007<body><> <t>I haven't updated xanga for ages...<>It
is because everything is just the same. <>Day at school<>tutition afterwards<>Dinner with Telelolo
( mr old's new name haha) <><t>Mark compostions if I am still free. <>Recently I <v>learn two
phrases.. <>one is : I'll get the job done<>Yes, i need to get the part time jobssss done <c>la if i wanan
have good days in aust<>another one is: I''ll remember this, you will pay. <>This is for those who
owned me things.
<PB0214><date>Wednesday, February 14, 2007<body><> WHY??????? <>WHO"S TELLLING
LIESSSSSS??? <>MY MOTHER SCHOOL SAID THEY HAVE NEVER RECEIVED THE LETTER
BUT HKIED SAID IT"S MY MOTHER SCHOOL WHO DECLINED THE REPLACEMENT.
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<> Dear Jasmine, <>We have contacted your alma mater, but they have declined to offer placement for
us since they have got quite a number of student teachers from other universities. Therefore, you'll be
going to another school for your practicum. <>Best, <>Ztia <>There could be two possibilities I guess,
<>one is----my principal and all the other teachers made lies together, they pretended they did not
receive any letter from HKIED. <>Another is---Zita doesn't feel like addmitting that they forgot to send
letter to my mother school and as they have planned to send me to another one, she simply socials me
with such an excuse. <>Honestly, I don't think that there are many student teachers in my mother school
( coz I went back to my own secondary school just a few days ago.) Also, with my contribution in my
own secondary school and the friendship I gained with my secondary school teachers. ( My prinicipal
once asked for my opinions of the performance of f.6 UE teacher, and I actually answered it in his
office with my UE teacher sitting next to me. Could you imagine that?!!!!!) <>Ridicously, I myself
don't even believe in my school teachers said that they have never received any notificiation from
HKIED. I guess a professional teacher training insititute will not be forgetful as this. <>So....can
anybody tell me the truth? I feel so helpless.
<PB0214><date>Wednesday, February 14, 2007<body><>I watched Portage with Telelolo yesterday.
<>The movie was a bit too scary, especially when filming the way that the woman who is taking
grass..... It just makes me think that it's a horror film. <>To a certain extent, I think this movie is a bit
too frightening but it is really informative . I mean you can see that they have actaully done q uite a lot
of research on the heroine stuff. <>I am looking for the delicious dinner tonight!
<PB0226><date>Monday, February 26, 2007<body><> saturday: sing K <>sunday: badminton +
watched my super-X girl friend....not an interesting one<>Monday: Running in the gym ... <>Need to
go to school tomorrow <c>la~
<PB0227><date>Tuesday, February 27, 2007<body><>
Fuck !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <>I was allocated to a
fucking bullshit school<>a vocational one!@!!!!!!!!!!! <>how can HKIED be that shit !
<PB0227><date>Tuesday, February 27, 2007<body> I lve in NTE <>u send me to KOwloon Bay !!!!
<>Why??????????? <>Why i need to teach in that kind of
school???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
<>Seeing the Fe briefing this afternoon plus their working style. <>Now i realised why hkied cannot be
promoted to an uni
<PB0228><date>Wednesday, February 28, 2007<body><> This is what i got last night, <>I still keep
viewing my polyu webmail from time to time to WISH if there could be any changes to the FE school.
<>Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:42:13 +0800<>From: "Larry W.C. Mo" <larry.w.c.mo@gmail.com> Add
To Address Book | This is Spam <>Subject: Field Experience Contact(HKWMA Chu Shek Lun
Secondary School) <>To: s0568370@ied.edu.hk, s0568387@ied.edu.hk <>Dear Yan and Wa, <>Nice
to have field experience with you. <>I am assigned to be the leader of our group. Therefore, I send this
e-mail to you for gathering your contacts. <>My contact are shown below: <> Name:Mo Wai Chung
(Larry) <>Mobile: 98653237<> MSN: icq99923222@hotmail.com<> ICQ:99923222 <>As i
viewed the terrible email , i found that the 'teacher' uses inclusive pronoun 'our' to describe Emily and I,
I started to wonder that he is not actually a teacher from that a school but another student from HKIED
who knows the news faster than me. <>Would it be possible that he is just a person who gathers
information only but not implying to me that i will be to teach in that kind of
school???????????????????????????????????????????????? <>Please don't send me to the
hell................................................................
<PB0305><date> Monday, March 05, 2007<body><> I am so sick. <>Sore throat... <>when i went to
see the doctor, the nurse asked if I had a fever, i said no. <>and the turth is<>my body temperature is
36.2C ( I feel i am warmer than i used to be that day! but still....)
<PB0319><date>Monday, March 19, 2007<body><> <t>Spent more than a thousand on clothes and
shoes...for the practicum....<t>can't buy any dress..coz it's too dangerous to wear any dress/skirt there.
<>Endless tuitions, one in the morning, several in the afternoon..<v>makes me suffocated. But this is
the only solution for the australia trip...money for air-ticket, money for daily spendings, money for the
host-fee, money for the notebook<>I intended to buy a notebook in Spet when there is specical offer
from polyu...it will be a lot cheaper at that time but last time when I went to the FE school..te
vice-prinicapl said ' you guys have your own note-book <c>ga la, <t>no need to borrow form us'. OK
fine, if you don't wanan borrow, then please don't tell us that there are computers available for
borrowiing at your school. and don't fucking assume that we are so free after school that I can help you
with the remidial classes..i mean you are expected to pay somebody to do this, ( the school even
wanna three of us go there again on Sats, Jesus, are you fXXkign crazy? it's my prime time for earning
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money !!!) <>Assignments, I know that there are loads of assigmnets waiting for me, but it seems to me
that they are so distant, it's too early to start when I don't even have any relevant materials with me but
it's too late when I wait for the end of the practicum. <>So when should I really start?
<PB0331><date>Saturday, March 31, 2007<title> BUSY<body><>I will be teaching F 1 English....
( honestly, the F1 Longman Englis is as easy as their new P.1 level, how could that be?) <>Can
anybody tell me how to teach pocessive pronouns? ( mine, yours, theirs...) <>Can you anybody think of
a situaton that you will be using those pocessive pronous a lot????? <>Can anybody bring me out of the
hell????
<PB0331><date>Saturday, March 31, 2007<body><> I wanna go travelling with telololololo<>I
wanna buy a notebook ( an elegant and handy one, but if i buy a brand new notebk pc, im afraid those
students in the school will steal it if it's too handy and good-looking) <>I wanna buy the air ticket
ASAP.....at least I do not need worry about how much I need to pay more than the others.....
<PB0406><date>Friday, April 06, 2007<body><> I watched the Bean's holidays<>Kinda miss my
Paris trip. <>Sortie.. Gare de Lyon!!!! I never expect that I could see than train station again!!!!!!!! <>in
the afternoon, I finally bought a notebook computer. <>Fujizu <c>ah....$ 9500 <c>ah.....it was a
misunderstanding which catalysed the purchaing process ,..anyway.. I spent $ 9500 within a minute.
<>the confiuration is quite good <c>ga.. <>the CPU is 1.5 G ahhaha super fast It's sth called Due Core
T2....i dunno what it is anyway<>80GB ( another model which broadway has discount offers 120
GB...but it' s $ 11248....) <>14.1 mon<>1.7 kg ( the lightest model is 1 kg but it's just a bit too
small...so tiny that you couldn't view the words clearly when using Ms word) <>sustainable period...4
hours<>Telolo helped me with do the window set up things and installed the microsoft office...
<><t>At night, had dinner with Telolo and his family... <>hoesntly, i dun like having dinner with such a
big group people and enjoying the food which i could never regard it as tasty or healthy. <>If you dont
want to show up with me in Mrs Chu's ball, why do you need me to show up in your realtives' dinner?
<>and worst still, <>I didn't bring him any present. <>How could I attend his b day dinner without
giving him a b day present?! <>I wanan go gym so bad! my legs are kind of ''itchy''<>i can't live....i can
't live without running!!!
<PB0411><date>Wednesday, April 11, 2007<body><>Holidays end... <><t>Did quite a lot of things in
this holidays... <><T>Bought a notebk computer..super expenisve<><t>Watched Mr. Bean <>Went to
Macau again ...lost money <c>ah this time<>Assignment <c>lae...nothing much was done
honestly..haha
<PB0417><date>Tuesday, April 17, 2007<body> <>old school<>kind teachers<>low ability ss<>F.1 ss
asks me, what is the meaning of 'order'/ 'describe'. <>Ok fine.
<PB0423><date>Monday, April 23, 2007<title> Littlewood......<body><> Believe it or not<>Professor
Littlewood was late today for the lesson observation. <>ohoh....When Emily and I were waiting for him
at the front gate, we were super worried...<t>the school is not easy to find. <>When we checked the
projector, it was out of order. How come the technician were so sure that it worked! <>Ai.... <>Anyway,
I <v>have to start the lesson even though he wasn't here, finally he was here when I finished my
introuction. <>When I saw him, i said, let me introduce to you, this is professor Littlewood from
HKIED. None of the students can utter his name correctly....charm<>So i <v>go on my lesson.....
<>Generally it went smoothly........except that fucking Sam who said i am a chinese, i won't speak
English. <>At last , the lesson eneded puntually and Littlewood gave us feedback.. <>thanks god, it
wasn't too bad.
<PC0223><date>Friday, February 23, 2007<body><> <t>Finished working at surgical ward for one
week *.* <>Actually, I found it was quite funny to work in another ward <>and <v>make some new
friends there!! <>
I have got about $ 700 <c>'lei si' there....<t>not so much as compared with Zoey!! <>Going to have two
days off...It is my restful time and I will go for a camp with Tsz Yan<><t>Having fun with my sweetie
tonight... <>We enjoyed Japanese food again!! So happy <$><>We went and mingled with the happy
crowd at Mong Kok ... <>We could hardly buy the movie ticket finally and have watched "Night At The
Museum"<>It is really a hilarious and relaxing movie indeed
<PC0228><date>Wednesday, February 28, 2007<body><> Night duty again!!! <><t>Not feeling good
these days as I have got severe stomachache... Ate little ... <><t>Feeling so cold today as I might have
already got a cold!! <>Hope full ward tonight and no admission anymore during my night duty<$><>
<PC0303><date>Saturday, March 03, 2007<body><> <t><v>Having dinner with my dearest friend
Ting Ting last night, I did feel so happy!! <>WE spent 4 hours to update the information of our lives of
these 4 years... <>I <v>can't stop talking ..hehe<>Thanks for all my friends to put aside your work and
share with me!! <>I love all of you!! <>Ting Ting.. <>I am looking forward to spending our night at
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The University of Edinburgh
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AIA world carnival 2006 tmr!!!
<PC0305><date>Monday, March 05, 2007<body><> After having some room for self-reflection...
<>We have solved our problems and inconsistencies<>And I want to say...... <>I have the impulse to
get married<$><>I must offer my heartfelt thanks to <>LING , COLIN, TINGTING & IRENE <>who
did care me so much <>and gave me confidence and endless support... <>U helped me to get back to
the right track of my life!! <>I LOVE ALL OF U*.*
<PC0307><date>Wednesday, March 07, 2007<body><> Ai....Finally I have finished this very very
busy night duty!! <>I just had 10 mins to sit down and enjoy my night food!! How come?! <>However,
I m such a person who <v>like working rather than just sitting down and spending my time !!
<>Thanks for your ride from St Teresa to MK KCR station... <>The journey is very short.. <> however,
everytime when I hv finished my duty and received your call at about 7:30.. <>The happiness has
already masked my tiredness!. <><t>Dined at Spaghetti House with my dearest tonight!!
<>Haha...Spaghetti House again!! <><t><v>Have ated my favourite Salmon Salad ..I m loving it!!
<><t>Have watched " PROTEGE" .... <>I think this movie is rather
educational<>Anyway...<t>enjoyed my Sleeping day *.*
<PC0309><date>Friday, March 09, 2007<title> Today....<body><> <t>Just staying at home and
learning English!! <>Wow...There is 15% discount at The commercial Press<>As a result, I have
bought two books for learning English<>One <v>called Learning English with the Famous...highly
recommended<>U can learn English by watching news, debates or interview of some famous people..
<>e.g. Lee Kuan Yew, George W. Bush and Warren Buffett...... <><t>Not only learning English from
them, but also learning how to be successful like them<>I m longing for doing operation with you in the
theatre.. <>SAT ?!
<PC0312><data>Monday, March 12, 2007<body><> <t>Finished my busy work on sat.. <><t>Reli
wanted to cry, I <c>felted very very tired <c>ar...give me a break plz!! <><t>Went to gym and then to
find you ! <><t>Enjoyed our dinner <><t>Stayed with you for your call night!! <><t>Relaxed and felt
the love n care from you.... <>After having breakfast with you at DeCarol, <><t><v>Doing gym with
Ling again<>And then started my work again!! <>Enjoyed this weekend!!
<PC0314><date>Wednesday, March 14, 2007<body><> COOKIE DAYS i MY DEAREST
FRIENDS<%>
<PC0320><date>Tuesday, March 20, 2007<title> A day for work and relax<body><>
<t>Finally...finished typing the minute of the 1st meeting... time for sleep <><t>Yesterday...
<>Reviewing the photos of few years ago... <><t>reli felt that I was so thin and weak at that time!! <>I
hv got 10 pounds more than that time now...at disbelief indeed! <>Juz because you always force me to
eat eat eat , steak n beef<>...n your fair system when eating !!! <>Ha....My mom should <v>thanks
you ...but now..she <v>start to stop me eating !! <>I really feel frustrated sometimes... <>Eat or Not to
eat?!
<PC0330><date>Friday, March 30, 2007<body><> Time flies<>One year is coming, <>Missing you at
this moment!!
<PC0408><date>Sunday, April 08, 2007<body><><t>Enjoyed the 3-day-2-night with u <><t>Cooking
i u, <t>watching movie i u, <t>going to AIA carnival i u and <t>having buffet i u !! <>Thx for ur love,
trust n honesty... <>Luv u<><t>Night again ... <>hv a strong impulse to go swimming <><t>Will go
swimming i Fiona on Thursday!!
<PC0411><date>Wednesday, April 11, 2007<body><>Wow... <>I really can't believe I am able to
sleep from 8am - 6pm after the night shift!! <>I really felt tired and sleepy!! <><t>Nowhere to go on
my sleeping day.. <>so I can sleep indulgently @. @<><t>Go swimming with Fiona tmr!! <><t>n then
will enjoy the buffet at Langham Hotel with my beloved ones... <>mami and UUU... <>look forward!!
<><t>will take more photos ..Yeah!
<PC0413><date>Friday, April 13, 2007<body> <> Unfortunate and Unhappy day actually.....<%><%>
<> In the first place, we planned to go swimming at Kowloon Park <>n then hv buffet at Langham
<>However, the indoor swimming pool was closed for repair n mum was sick!! <>So, we ended up
doing gym at PHYSICAL..wow..Fiona is so fit le.. <>n then we had dinner at a Thai restaurant at
Langham Place<>The train to Kowloon was broken, <>so I needed to take another train and it made
me to be late... <>sori to Fiona.. <>Sauna at PHYSICAL... <>so I threw my cell in the locker, <>n I
made u angry for waiting for me... <>n whilst i was hurried to meet u, <>there was some problem for
getting back Fiona's deposit.. <>ah ...delay again!! <>Why...so many obstacles? <>Unhappy today....
<>I was jealous of ur past ... <>I was jealous of ur care to others<>sometimes, i did feel astonished at
my generousness <>However, at this moment, ... <>I started to find myself is not so generous..I do care
about it!! <>though i still won't get stuck in some trivial matters<>But i trust in one thing .... <>True
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love shuold be developed from true faith... <>from Vani
<PC0416><date>Monday, April 16, 2007<body><>CANNOT BE YOUR FIRST, <>BUT TRY HARD
TO BE YOUR FINAL... <> Impressed by EEGEED’s promise
<PC0420><date>Friday, April 20, 2007<body><> Money cannot buy love!!! <>And at least, My
LOVE cannot be sold by <>romatic dinner, wonderful present....such kind of extravagant life
<PC0422><date>Sunday, April 22, 2007<body><>Very Exhausted and Crazy days... <>Why ??? The
ward was in a chaos... <>Many patient charts were put on the table... <>Many doctors came at the same
time...Hateful<>I reli want to tell you ....can u see ur patient by urself?? <>why do u always need my
assistance?? <>The only thing I had to do was to clear up all the charts...so disgusting!! <>Cheers...
<>My AL has come... <>Need to use my happy faces to memorize these cheerful days
<PC0424><date>Tuesday, April 24, 2007<body><> <t>Have just read the Outward Bound website<>I
really want to join the Philippine Voyage Course.. <>However, they will only offer one course this
year... in December.. <><t>Seem that it is no way to match my schedule..
<PC0426><date>Thursday, April 26, 2007<body><> <t>Have resumed my piano practice and gym
again... <><t>Vy happy..new start and will not be ended<$><>I hv promised myself!! <>I reli like
playing piano vy vy vy much <c>ga!! <><v>I hv dinner with Colin tonight... <><v>Hv tried a Japanese
restaurant at Langham Place....Great !! <><v>Hv had a long chat about man tonight.. <>And I hv
made a conclusion ... <>none of the men is good!!!<%><%><%><%>
<PC0505><date>Saturday, May 05, 2007<body><> I seldom have holiday at the weekend, <>so I
decided to go out to have lunch with you even I had abdominal pain ... <>I was so happy as I could
finally buy my new mobile...YEAH yeah<%><> LG Chocolate KG800
<PC0510><date>Thursday, May 10, 2007<body><><t> Have finished my night shift again and
enjoying my Sleeping day... <><t>Couldn't sleep for long and wake up at 12 noon.....sigh<><t>Fed up
with this shifting life...<t>always can't sleep well n feel tired!!! <><t>Will have night shift on MON
again<><t><v>Have watched Ching Yu 's concert on 8/5... <>wow...so wonderful<>I love her so
much<$>
<PD0101><date>Monday, January 01, 2007<title> Happy New Year~~<body><>Dear friends,
<>Happy new year! I'm such a lazy pig that I make use of xanga instead of SMS to wish you all a
happy new year. Although I'm always busy and not 'in touch' with most of you most of the time, I care
about all of you. I sincerely hope that everyone will have a good start this year and be able to achieve
what we what to achieve in the year of 2007. <>Cheers, <>Mabel
<PD0103><date>Wednesday, January 03, 2007<title> Failed~<body><> This is my first time failing
any subject in my uni life. So sad about it. I am trying to handle my feeling first before I make any
further decision.
<PD0104><date>Thursday, January 04, 2007<title> Focus~<body><> There should only be ONE
focus, right? <> Thanks everyone for you support. I think I have made my decision. I'm not gonna let
this affect my work!
<PD0108><date>Monday, January 08, 2007<title> Take Care ar~~<body><> Lily: Rest more and no
more alcohol for you anymore. <>Fiona: You're the only one who can help yourself. Be STRONG!!
Manage your heart and your hand will do what's in your head.
<PD0113><date>Saturday, January 13, 2007<title> Report~<body><><t> Got the GPA of the first sem
yesterday. I didn't fail any subject at last. Without handing in my last term paper, I still managed to get a
C, that's actually not bad at all. <> Thanks for everyone who fought the grade for me and <v>worry
about me. <> I hope I will have a chance to resume my study with quality in the future.
<PD0118><date>Thursday, January 18, 2007<title> Hospitalized~~<body><> Damn you CHICKEN
POX!!! I've been hopitalized for 4 days and I really wanna get back to work as soon as possible. Thanks
all who have visited me (especially someone who haven't had it before....) and been calling me
constantly to show your care. Thank you so much. <> And I really wanna thanks my dad for he isn't
really sure whether he caught chickpox before, but still he visited me days and nights. <> Thanks all the
Edvenians for your help and taking up my trainings.... I really wanna go back to the battlefield as soon
as possible. Although my 'body' is away, my 'soul' will be with you all. <> Cherry and Eric, if you really
caught it, sorry for everything. <> I dun wanna be sick AGAIN!!!
<PD0120><date>Saturday, January 20, 2007<title> Back to Work~<body><><t> Finally go back to
work tonight at 8.. worked until 11:30, not very productive but <v>sort out a long long 'TO DO LIST'...
Without our tank, we have to do the administration work also... Everything is running OUT! <> So
happy that I can go back to the battlefield tomorrow morning and for a whole day!!<$>
<PD0120><date>Saturday, January 20, 2007<title> Happy Sat~~<body><> Full loaded and get ready
to go! <t>Worked for a whole day. Feeling so satisfied.
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<PD0123><date>Tuesday, January 23, 2007<title> Tired~<body><> <t>Dun know why feeling so
tired even after 8-hour of sleep... Maybe I am really not fully recovered yet. <> <t><v>Take the car
back today. Thanks Fiona's dad for fixing it for me.It's now in a really good condition, smooth and
quiet. Hope I will try to drive more afterwards. (But actually I nearly <v>crash it today when I finished
test driving it...... So embarrassing...)
<PD0128><date>Sunday, January 28, 2007<title> Love Working~<body><> I dun know why, I just
love my work. <> There are 'HOLES' (they are really BIG holes) on my face, but i dun know why I just
dun mind, what I concern most is whether I can go to work. Holes on the face is no longer important to
me.
<PD0131><date>Wednesday, January 31, 2007<title> Round the World Trip...<body><> Ho Man Tin
and then Tai Po and then Stanley and lastly Central. What a working style~ I like it.
<PD0204><date>Sunday, February 04, 2007<title> Prison Break<body><> The prisoners were
escaping again! Which means I fxxked up the class AGAIN!
<PD0209><date>Friday, February 09, 2007<title> Stepped on SHIT~<body><> Sorry everybody that
the last post is acutally about my job... But it's really how I feel. And that Mr. Lee is the name of the
customer (school?)... I fucked up and was so upset about everything for a week already. But I overcame
it yesterday and I know I can clean the mess up.
<PD0211><date>Sunday, February 11, 2007<title> Tired~<body><> This is the most tiring week I
have had in my life!
<PD0212><date>Monday, February 12, 2007<title>"EAT"~~<body><> Eat" is not a verb, it's a sound
made when my car is Streching against the corner of a pillar....
<PD0213><date>Tuesday, February 13, 2007<title> I need more time~<body><> I needa pick myself
up piece by piece.... which takes time...
<PD0216><date>Friday, February 16, 2007<title> Balance~<body><> I really needa find out the
balance between do and non-doer... What a difficult task...
<PD0219><date>Monday, February 19, 2007<title> CNY in Shanghai~~<body><> Hi everybody!!
Belated <c>Kung Hei Fat Choi! <t>Finally got online here... <> Although my mood was not very good
before I left for Shanghai, but once I got upgraded to business class at the boarding gate I thought I will
become luckier this year.. (just a wishful thinking...) <> <t>Keep eating a lot every meal and ate a lot of
crab these days. The food here is really good and I think I really needa treat Fong Fong (who is my
brother-in-law's cousin, should be my aunt I think) and her family BIG FEASTS when they come to
HK... <> I did not take any photo this time as I dun feel like taking photos these days... I am not
recovered yet (still...) Before getting on the plane I SMS with my boss telling him that I still felt quite
upset... But I just couldn't find out the root cause. I'm trying very hard to overcome my bad feeling but
still, I think I need some more time. <> <t>Still picking up the broken pieces... <> Dear me, <> Get
well soon!!
<PD0220><date>Tuesday, February 20, 2007<title> Going out~<body><> Yesterday I got a call from
one of my old friends and suddently I wanna meet my friends one by one.... <t>Seems that I was too
busy in the past few months and I know I will be extremely busy from 26/2 until mid-April.... The
schedule is really carzy and when I look at it in my outlook, I just can't help singing "Tetrus" <-- dunno
if I spelt it right.... , as the schedule looks really like one when we get to level 9, everything's packed
and full and the blocks keep falling down.... <> There are many friends who I really wanna have dinner
with but I can't tell which day I will be free since I dun know when I needa work and when I dun. My
office hour is 'floating' while my training hour is normal school hour + office hour... So guys I'm sorry if
I keep resechduling our dates... <> Hope I can see you guys soon!
<PD0222><date>Thursday, February 22, 2007<title> March~<body><> I've got my missions in
March... Marvellous~
<PE0102><date> Tuesday, January 02, 2007<body><> <t>Finally back to B-town.<>2007. <>So
many secret plans in my mind...
<PE0103><date>Wednesday, January 03, 2007<body><%><> So I walked by one of my favorite
Monets again, after one year. <>Another year is waiting for me. <>Another dawn is waiting for me.
<>Life is such a beautiful solitude.
<PE0110><date>Wednesday, January 10, 2007<body> <>I want to tell my Teacher the truth...<$>
<PE0111><date>Thursday, January 11, 2007<body><> So I walked again on the empty street after
1:30am. <>But I still can't find my soul. <>I feel like a lunatic drunkard. <>My life is just ridiculous.
<PE0112><date>Friday, January 12, 2007<body><> I told him everything in my lesson. <>My fears,
my griefs, my fatigue, everything. <>Life is never easy.
<PE0117><date>Wednesday, January 17, 2007<title> Reserved, but not confirmed yet... <body><>
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Date Wednesday, February 21, 2007 Time5 p.m. LocationAuer Hall<> Ravel: Valses nobles et
sentimentales <>Haydn: Sonata in G Minor, Hob.XVI: 44<>Brahms: Sonata in C Major, Op. 1
<PE0117><date>Wednesday, January 17, 2007<body><>"If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it."
<>Finally I can understand this memorable quote thoroughly. <>Life still goes on, no matter you like it
or not.
<PE0117><date>Wednesday, January 17, 2007<body><><t> Suddenly want to see it so bad.
<>Perhaps I need a Long Vacation too.
<PE0118><date>Thursday, January 18, 2007<body><> Currently watching<%><%><> Thanks Miss
Wang~<>I like his playing so much!
<PE0119><date>Friday, January 19, 2007<body><> I feel like I'm escaping everyday. <>Will there be
miracle?
<PE0122><date>Monday, January 22, 2007<body><><%>I was shocked this morning when I
<v>wake up.<>Today unexpected of the heavy snow.<>But it was an unexpected happy day. I had a
snow fight with some of my friends. (Technically speaking, it was the first time in my
life…<$>)<>More pictures on facebook:<><!><>Sometimes, I do hope that I can live like an innocent
child.<>There are just too many unbearable pains in adult’s world.
<PE0123><date>Tuesday, January 23, 2007<body><> I'm so afraid. My playing ain't secure enough.
<>My labored barbaric self conquered my poetic self easily... <>Sounded like a machine..<$>
<PE0127><date>Saturday, January 27, 2007<body><>"Be a good orchestra." <>I will try my best.
<PE0128><date>Sunday, January 28, 2007<body><> I cannot understand myself. <>Maybe it's the
time to leave.
<PE0129><date>Monday, January 29, 2007<body> I am really sad of what you did to me. <>I saw it.
<>I knew it. <>Again and again. <>But I just cannot believe it.
<PE0130><date>Tuesday, January 30, 2007<body><> The song is haunting me... <>Did I disappoint
you or let you down? <>Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown? <>'Cause I saw the end
before we'd begun, <>Yes I saw you were blinded and I knew I had won. <>So I took what's mine by
eternal right. <>Took your soul out into the night. <>It may be over but it won't stop there, <>I am here
for you if you'd only care. <>You touched my heart you touched my soul. <>You changed my life and
all my goals. <>And love is blind and that I knew when, <>My heart was blinded by you. <>I've kissed
your lips and held your head. <>Shared your dreams and shared your bed. <>I know you well, I know
your smell. <>I've been addicted to you. <>Goodbye my lover. <>Goodbye my friend. <>You have
been the one. <>You have been the one for me. <>I am a dreamer but when I wake, <>You can't break
my spirit - it's my dreams you take. <>And as you move on, remember me, <>Remember us and all we
used to be<>I've seen you cry, I've seen you smile. <>I've watched you sleeping for a while. <>I'd be
the father of your child. <>I'd spend a lifetime with you. <>I know your fears and you know mine.
<>We've had our doubts but now we're fine, <>And I love you, I swear that's true. <> cannot live
without you. <>Goodbye my lover. <>Goodbye my friend. <>You have been the one. <>You have been
the one for me. <>And I still hold your hand in mine. <>In mine when I'm asleep. <>And I will bear my
soul in time, <>When I'm kneeling at your feet. <>Goodbye my lover. <>Goodbye my friend. <>You
have been the one. <>You have been the one for me. <>I'm so hollow, baby, I'm so hollow. <>I'm so,
I'm so, I'm so hollow...
<PE0131><date>Wednesday, January 31, 2007<body><%>
<PE0131><date>Wednesday, January 31, 2007<body> <> Why are you doing that? <>I really want to
ask for an answer.
<PE0202><date>Friday, February 02, 2007<body><> I don't feel well. <>I thought that I'd be good.
<>But I just can't. <>I just can 't.
<PE0203><date> Saturday, February 03, 2007 <body> I just feel more depressed after my lesson.
<>Shoot I'm not ready for a recital or anything.
<PF0212><date>Monday, February 12, 2007<body> <><t>Not in a mood of doing anything<>leave
me alone<>I feel so uncomfortable w/ everything..... <><t>wanna ve a good rest......
<PF0218><date>Sunday, February 18, 2007 <body><%>
<PF0301><date>Thursday, March 01, 2007<body><> <t>failed the cso interview <c>lu......the HR is
so efficient <c>le~kinda expected when i thought about my performance last night........aiya very
useless fiona~<>these days i feel very insecured without a job...........hope i will be ok...but i really dun
wanna rush to get a job that i will regret one day..i just wonder how long it takes to be employed
again??? <>but luckily if i were to choose again, i would still prefer to be unemployed......
<PF0302><date>Friday, March 02, 2007<body><> <t>Going to another cso interview next morning....
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<><t>feeling a bit lost as i only focus on sending out applications...so that i keep myself busy for doing
sth....and at least i m trying to work sth out...... <>but never think about the questions where exactly i
wanna work at..........I m so unprepared.....how can i WOW at any job interviews...... <>it's just a vicious
cycle.. <><t>SPENT 2 hrs but only cleaned little in my room....TOO MESSY! <><t>the other day i
heard some <c>C LAI gossiping in the sauna room..they were all chitchating abt the messy rooms that
their daughters have.....n it sounds so familiar to me.......werent they describing me?
WAHAHA......maybe every gals in their 20s are all like this.......MESSY n LAZY.....
<PF0307><date> Wednesday, March 07, 2007 <body> <>undeniably i m getting older to play over a
long night....every afternoon once i got up and <v>peep at the mirror, OH GOD my face was so dull
and it <v>looks so tired..with dark n puffy eyes...and for the whole day i m lacking energy.........U
KNOW it always takes more than 2 days to recover!!! <><t>Time to quit it perhaps<><t>Feeling more
comfortable w/ the new job............ <><t>got a bit more ready than yesterday...maybe things come too
fast....n i was shocked..but.my long vacation finally comes to a full stop....i will resume working
starting from next week, 12 March~<><t>Time to get myself ready in THE last few days....needa do
my hair n nail.......and my eyebrow..<t>couldnt MAKE it on saturday <c>lu
<PF0311><date>Sunday, March 11, 2007<body><><t>was so exhausted......... <><t>Havent been
shopping for more than 10 days already! KEEP going fiona~~loads of temptations out there..espcially
when i saw the nice stuff that lily n mabel <v>ve shown me <>tonight~~geogeous~really great
<c>ar!!!!! <t>Earning big money recently~Quite unexpected!!!! THX<>Things are getting more
organsed n sound for me...not only work, but my emotions my life n my surrounding....i could feel it...
<>wishing myself a good start in the coming year~After all.. ..my fate will soon be ready for a rise after
it has been hitting the ground so hard for some time last yr~ <t>prepared to defeat depression~! No
more tears n byebye puffy eyes
<PF0314><date>Wednesday, March 14, 2007<body><> <t>Feel so thankful today.... <>Thanks for
sending me angels in the workplace wherever i m......blessed n lucky...was so touching n impressed
tonight<><t>WILL try my best to do the job well<>thanks god...u always send me considerate and
supportive boss all the time...though i m very green in the workplace, i feel loved n valued..... <>...<$>
<PF0315><date>Thursday, March 15, 2007<body><> a bit stressed<>i know things r always out
of my control...but y cant i make it better for everyone <c>le? <><t>wont blame others for being so
demanding or rude....they r JUST like that~welll that's alright..that's fine........ <>AND i m alright
too..i think everybody definitely has a reason to sound threatening n mean......WELL....just let them be
n hope they will feel better soon~at least i ve tried my very best to make things better..though the result
may not always be encouraging~WELL~well.. <>~<t>just a learning process :>
<PF0321><date>Wednesday, March 21, 2007<body><> A zillion thanks....to everybody......when i say
everybody I MEAN it really..my frds my colleagues my family n even my customers............ <><t>had
a relaxing n enjoyable night out w/ my frds~thx yanyan n gloria~we chatted a lot <c>le~<t><v>knew u
guys for so many yrs..SO comfortable n spontaneous conversation/...loads of laughters n
fun~..especially YANYAN <c>le~i knew her since i was 9!!!! which's really a treasure in my life~
<PF0324><date>Saturday, March 24, 2007<body><> A relaxing week~thanks dear~~<><t>felt a little
bit disappointed n annoyed soon after work.............but then the fun n chat n laughter all night seems
make me forget all abt that~YEAH great<>looking forward to the real weekend~<>AI how come i
needa work full day on saturday! it's really a shame to leave at 10sth when everybody is really having a
holiday mood!!!!!! <>And OF COZ ｓａｔｕｒｄａｙ is the busiet day of the week~~<t>really
needa squeeze some time for a drink n wewe~U KNOW~!
<PF0327><date>Tuesday, March 27, 2007<body><>Thanks a lot
<PF0330><date>Friday, March 30, 2007<body><><t>being sexually harrassed early in the morning
today........ai..so scared................. <>Apart from thanks, i dunno what i could
say ...........well..........<t>better stop here<>and then <>AGAIN<>i m so annoyed...... <>so disappointed
n lost...............not happy in general
<PF0405><date>Thursday, April 05, 2007<body> <>Holiday~~YEAH~!!!!!!!!!!!!<>(but i m broke)
<><t>so happy to hear that........when........Last night mr P called n thanked me for arranging all those
with EDvenue......Quite possibly that he's going to arrange a whole lot more n employ them for the engl
enhancement scheme~YEA~WIN WIN~<><t>SO sweet <c>le~aiya i actually should ve arranged it
earlier for u <c>le~too bad <c>la~
<PF0411><date>Wednesday, April 11, 2007<body><> exhausted.........a full day of work plus my DAY
1..............the back pain nearly killed me..hope i can handle it tmr~(probably tmr would be a real
disaster) <><t>So surprised to see u tonight~thought u had been home n out w/ frds already..........thx
for ur time siu ming<><t>was wandering at H&M to ve a peek of everything n then there u called~so
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sweet~<>n the next moment u appeared in front of me <c>le~<><t>Cant see u in central again next
week <c>lu.........
<PF0424><date>Tuesday, April 24, 2007<body><> Day off~<><t>Had 13 hrs of sufficient sleep
finally.........n waited for my honey to come over after work~~Happy to see u today~THX a lot~~we ate
a lot today.....had a very special tea time and then a very full dinner n also those delicious desserts.....i
know it's really far n hot to walk home w/ me..i know u've been melting n it must be really
uncomfortable to stay outdoors under ur tiring suit....thanks for staying w/ me for such a long
night .......n hope u do take enough rest as well!! <>no wonder i m getting fatter n fatter like u do
<c>LA~WAHAHA~
<PF0503><date>Thursday, May 03, 2007<body><> Dead<>very stressful<>A shopalcohic
REALREAL~
<PF0505><date>Saturday, May 05, 2007<body><>Being extremely ridiculous n unreasonable to u
tonight~~maybe i m seeing u too much n it turns out to be a disaster.....it makes me
sick~REALLY<>STILL.. <><t>have to work early in the morning tomorrow...... <><t>very
frustrating...n threatening to talk to you anymore..........u'll pay<>i m not the kind of gal who can stand
those humiliation..DUN ever ever try to speak to me in that way..GET AWAY i said
<P0507><date>Monday, May 07, 2007<body><> thanks dear...u r so special<>thanks mabel
too<>sometimes i m still struggling whether i made a right move a few months ago...what will i be if i
m still staying there? will i gonna be ok n what will i be like next year~? NO IDEA~<>but one thing for
sure is that <>i know we r not gonna be the same if i did stay...............probably i found ur phone calls
annoying n pushing me hard...and actually i really did!..and u will be scolding me ....really seriously
behind the phone or after hanging the line..WAHAHA...<t>just too busy n forgetful at that tiem!
<PF0513><date>Sunday, May 13, 2007<body><>So excited i was~last night we went to drinking at
the same old place..yea~i ve been kinda looking forward to it for the past two weeks coz i long for some
real fun n laughters w/ my frds... <>but well the ideas of having a relaxing n crazy night <v>gone
impossible ever since i stepped into the bar....well u know what.....i unfortunately ran into them for the
first time!! ,,,.those fucking arrogant ppl remind me of the most heartbreaking n insulting birthday
party..that i ve ever gone...obviously from the very first moment till the end of the night, i was
so unnatural n trembling....though trying hard pretending to be so calm n alright~<>n what makes
things more dreadful is that when u told me those barbarians ve been gazing at u for a long time (no
wonder u felt so..i thought) , u ALSO watched back n found that they r actually frds of u at the
uni...how come?!?! WWWWtf...how weird n ridiculous it could be if u really go ahead to say hello to
them.....isnt that killing me?!
<>..................................................................................................................................................................
.........................<>WELL<><t>so drunk n sleepy in the middle of the night.......<t>luckily able to walk
home after some sleep.... <>please<>never wanna ve that experience AGAIN
<PF0530><date>Wednesday, May 30, 2007<body><> <t>Had a good rest today~<><t>been spending
big money all the time recently......maybe thinking of making a list n been more self control~<t>Time to
stop <c>la!!!!! <>Quite nice
<PG0106><date>Saturday, January 06, 2007<body> <><c>nga yo ha say yo<>
I am back~
<PG0110><date>Wednesday, January 10, 2007<body><>oh...i am sick<>i had a sore throat
yesterday<>after i <v>had dinner with my family last nite, i felt more sick<>tired legs an
dizzy<><t>but still had to go back hall<>the 15-min walk was too long for me when i was sick...
<><t>so hard to manage to go back<><t>then, took 2 pills of panadol<>though i am strongly against
panadol<>i still took it cause i was dying<>the medicine made me feel more dizzy but was no able to
make me sleep well<><t>this morning, still went to work<><v>keep spreading bateria in my office
through my cough<>running nose, sore throat, fever..... <>almost die<><t>still have to go to IED
tmr<>so i made a booking at the ied clinic<>but i doubt if the doctor would really see me coz i am not a
real student there<><t>still have no time to organise the photos<><t>will upload them soon
<PG0117><date>Wednesday, January 17, 2007<body><><!><> the above link is for your reference of
the australian visa<>please note that all hksar passport owners need the australian visa
<PG0117><date>Wednesday, January 17, 2007<body><> these are not what i need<>looking forward
to 2/3... <>why my program is 4-year?
<PG0121><date>Sunday, January 21, 2007<body><> <t>went to miss lik's wedding<><t>met
principal chan there<>he said i will be back to kcc................. <>ahi..................... <>mr rowlands joked
at me.....hahaha<>purple tie and purple dress<><t>first time that he <v>is willing to wear purple<>but i
know it's not bcoz of me, <>it's bcoz his professor said sharp ties are much better than the black ties he
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wore b4<>ahi................................ <>mr rowlands is from australia but he doesn;t know where lismore
is... <>>_<!<>love me, don't go......
<PG0122><date>Monday, January 22, 2007<body><> <t>watched happy birthday<><t>wasn't
impressed<>firstly coz we can guess what was going on<>secondly i really hate that kind of
relationship<>overall, ok <c>la... <><t>don't know why i am so tired today.. <><t>just don't wanna
work <><t>was late for an hour
<PG0126><date>Friday, January 26, 2007<title>Fare<body><> For ELT buddies, <>Hong Kong Brisbane - Hong Kong / dept on 02 Jun 07<>By Cathay Pacific Airway <>@HK$ 5670.00 + tax @HK$
1464.00 / per person<>Travel period : 06 Apr 07 - 30 Apr 07<>Fare effective: 28/09/06 31/01/07<>Ticket valdity 0-35 day / Rebooking Fee @HK$ 500.00 per reservation change and must be
made befor orginal dept flight date / Non refund<>@HK$ 7830.00 + tax @hk$ 1464.00 / per
person<>Travel period : 06 Apr 07 - 30 Apr 07<>Fare effective : 28/09/06 - 31/01/07<>Ticket valdity
0- 1yrs / Rebooking is allowed with applicable period and valdity and must be made befoer the orginal
dept date otherwise no shown penalty @HK$ 600.00 / Non Refund<>By Qantas Airways<>@HK$
5450.00 + tax<>Travel period : 07 apr 2007 - 30 Jun 2007<>Fare effective : 13/102006 30/06/2007<>valdity 0-35 day<>rebooking fee HK$ 500.00 and must be made before orginal dept date
<>Non Refund<>@HK$ 7500.00 + tax <>Travel period : 07 Apr 2007 - 30 Jun 2007<>Fare effective :
13/10/2006-30/062007<>Valdity 0 - 1 yrs<>rebooking is allowed within the applicable period and must
be made befoer orginal dept date / Non Refund<>.<>T fare quoted is quite expensive. <>So, still keep
quoting. <>And some of us suggested than we may think of indirect flight. <>I will try to find out the
feasibility of it and the fare. <>You are welcome to give me any details realted to the air tickets!
<>Thanks!!!!!!!
<PG0127><date>Saturday, January 27, 2007<body><> Finally, I knew what happened. <>The truth is
totally different from what the majority GUESSED. <>I don't have any stance that's why I want to
know what happen. <>And just kind of don't wanna see some misunderstandings alwyas occur. <>But
maybe, that's true. It's no point to explain anything if everything is already assumed. <>What should I
say? <>The only thing I can say is TRUTH IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN FACT. <>nonononono.....
fact should not be the thing we guess. <>just hope everything will be fine and no more silly things
happen. <><t>Learnt driving for 3 nights. <>2 hours each night. <>My left hand and leg are super tired
now. <><t>Paid for 2 more extra lessons. <>I don't mind paying a bit more since I have already paid a
lot. <>But just hope what I paid is worth paying. <>Tomato called me last nite. <>Maybe he's right.
<>I<v> better spend what I <v>spend on school of motoring on traveling to Thailand and hire a car to
practice there. <><t>Had a little surprise last nite. <>Just didn't expect he <v>will be waiting me
outside. <>I said I am easily satisfied. <>That's already more than enough to make me feel so sweet.
<>Thanks! <><t>Plaaning the trip to Las Vegas again. <><t>This time, must do some crazy things........
<>If I dare to...........hahahahahahahaha<><t><v>Ask a friend's friend's friend about the tickets stuff.
<>He suggested that indirect flight is one possible means to save money. <>And the waiting time is
approximately 2 hours. <><t>Though is not a really preferable option in terms of time for us, <>let
keep quoting all the possibilities and let al the classmates vote for the one they like most <c>la. <>And
please let us know if anyone of you have quoted a cheaper fare for the benifit of the whole class.
<PG0129><date>Monday, January 29, 2007<body><><c> ho sleepy<c> ar <><t>need to drive again
tmr<>so tired<><t>need to work again tmr<>so tired<><t>today tired too<>by the way <>did one very
first thing in my life<><t>had breakfast at tsui wah<>i mean BREAKFAST! <>we were there at 6:30
and realised it's not 24-hour open<>then we waited till 7<>but finally <v>i can;t order the noddles since
noddles are only offered after 8... <>omg<><t>called fan this morning<><t>don't know why always
want to tell fan a lot of things<>no matter up and down<>just like telling her a lot of things that she
may not be really interested<>but she will just keep laughing<>and so do i ...hahhahahaha<>um.... i
can say it's a misunderstding<>no... lots of misunderstandings<>ahi..... <>but is it worth explaining?
<>god knows?! <>ahi ya... <>aia ar<>wanna 'fing' there sososoososoososo much! <>when can we have
BREAKFAST together again lei?????????!?!??!?!?!?!?!??!!?!??!?!?!??!?!?
<PG0129><date>Monday, January 29, 2007<body><> <c>stiffed left body..... <>manual is not hard
but very BUSY<>i really like this word<>coz i really have lots more things to do compare with the
auto<><t>i think really no need to rush la<>plenty of time <c>la<>and <t>no need to make things
complicated<>tmr is 30/1<>the day after is 31/1<>and then the day after tmr is... <>i guess i am the
only one who knows, who cares and who remembers... <><t>kind of sad but just can't expect bad things
will turn out to be good things.... <><t>need to go to ied tmr again... <>i can predict that i may take a
taxi at tai po<>so if u are late tmr, don't hesistate, call me<><t>need to learn driving again tmr nite....
<>just hope i can handle it
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<PG0202><date>Friday, February 02, 2007<body><> fan, i know u have guessed correctly
<c>la<>fan, emily, kathy...will we really go in march????? <>korea<>us<>(thai)
<>australia<>hahahaha<>going crazy<>today, worked<>tmr, will work<>things are so simple<>be
positive<>by the way, is there anyone instrested in skiing? <>my friend told me there's shop selling
ski-wear at a very cheap price somewhere near causeway bay<>we can check it out together <c>lei<>u
know, actully i wanna buy a 'PTU' face mask hahahahha, hopefully in purple <c>law~<>it's an
important day today<>fan, guess what it is <c>la<>i think u can guess <c>gei<><t>went to aia to
celebrate<>hehehehe..coz i know, actually no one would go with me <c>gala<>even if someone goes
with me, they don't really like the rides<>so we decided to go together<>so happy that he still
remember what today is<>though it is becoz i reminded about ten thousand times....... <><t>for the
rides... <>i didn't take all the them since they were so TIRING<>i have never used the word 'TIRING'
to describe rides but in fact the are<>especially the one which makes us upside down and turns slowly
and endlessly<>i just jept shouting 'very tired, let me go down, still not finished?' sth like that<>instaed
of screaming... <>g force..ok <c>la<>very COMFORTABLE<><t>actually, tried it two years b4<>i
used to think that i was cheated that time since the ride was so short 2 years aso<>i thought it was short
since the staff remembered the no. of turns worngly and asked the wrong people to 'get off the car'<>but
this time i realised i wasn't treated since the ride is in fact evry short<>yet, it wad nice<>and i highly
recommend it since it;s COMFORTABLE and u won't have any dizzing or vomitting feeling<><t>tired
the<c> 'jump buliding machine'<>the whole process was so fast.. <>i couted the time<>we spent 10
seconds on waiting to die<>and the dying process took less than 1 second<>it was the scariest ride in
the aia<><t>tired a lot other rides including driving the cars<>the cars were uncontrollable.....
<><t>didn't try the boat rides since we didn't want to get wet<>and the most important thing was that
we <v>have to carry our bags in the boat rides<>which means that our mobile phones are subject to the
damage of water<>so we didnt try the rides<><t>got a small bear and a fish<>from the game
booth<>haha fish and bear palm hahahahah<><t>will share the photos later<>thanks for the
perfume<>i like it!
<PG0202><date> Friday, February 02, 2007<body><> Colleen is INSANE all the time
<PG0205><date>Monday, February 05, 2007<body><> <t>met a very good car instructor
today<><t>drove quite well today, at least not even any <c>'die fire'<>and i could do all the required
tests<>i know, i am always too nervous<><t>need to control myself tmr<><t>really want to be
instructed by todat's instructor again.. <>Me: will u work tmr? <>Instructor: Why you ask so? <>Me: I
want to know whether you can teach me how to drive tmr. <>Instructor: Then, I must not.. <>Me:
Why? <>Instructor: Because I don't teach this kind of car. <>Me: What do you teach then?????
<>Instructor: I teach bus. <>Me: Ha...so how come u taught me? <>Instructor: Since no one learns bus
today... <>Ahi....... <>Hope Everything will be under MY control tmr!! <>Wish me luck!!!!!!!!
<PG0207><date>Wednesday, February 07, 2007<body><> why?
<PG0208><date>Thursday, February 08, 2007<body><> I promise, I will curse you every day<>less
than 1<>less than 1
<PG0210><date>Saturday, February 10, 2007<title> WHAT IS A DEPRESSIVE
DISORDER?<body><>A depressive disorder is an illness that involves the body, mood, and thoughts.
It affects the way a person eats and sleeps, the way one feels about oneself, and the way one thinks
about things. A depressive disorder is not the same as a passing blue mood. It is not a sign of personal
weakness or a condition that can be willed or wished away. People with a depressive illness cannot
merely "pull themselves together" and get better. Without treatment, symptoms can last for weeks,
months, or years. Appropriate treatment, however, can help most people who suffer from depression.
<>SYMPTOMS OF DEPRESSION AND MANIA<>Not everyone who is depressed or manic
experiences every symptom. Some people experience a few symptoms, some many. Severity of
symptoms varies with individuals and also varies over time. <>Depression<>Persistent sad, anxious, or
"empty" mood<>Feelings of hopelessness, pessimism<>Feelings of guilt, worthlessness,
helplessness<>Loss of interest or pleasure in hobbies and activities that were once enjoyed, including
sex<>Decreased energy, fatigue, being "slowed down"<>Difficulty concentrating, remembering,
making decisions<>Insomnia, early-morning awakening, or oversleeping<>Appetite and/or weight loss
or overeating and weight gain<>Thoughts of death or suicide; suicide attempts<>Restlessness,
irritability<>Persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment, such as headaches,
digestive disorders, and chronic pain
<PG0210><date>Saturday, February 10, 2007<body><><t>just watched 'night at the museum' with
man, fai, and kwok wah<>hahahahahahahahahha so funny<>evreything is so 'on', <c>ho mo liu but just
made me laugh a lot<><t>went to work very early in the morning<><t>discovered that i like checking
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bank rec<>though it's very tiring<>but just like it! <>okokok vegas trip is unavoidable <c>gala<>but
how come a boy is more troublesome than a girl? <>i mean so troublesome in making his
decision<>and how come the travel agent is like unwilling to earn your money????? <><t>afternoon,
ate tsui wah together<>hohohohoho mei~~~<>love the soup<><c>drink it all<><t>then, walk street
togther<>walk and walk <>without any aims<>but i just love that we can talk and talk when we walk
and walk<>it's been ages that we havn't talked so much<>and it's been ages that we havn't went out in
the afternoon<>a more happy thing was that<>we played swing<>hahahahahaha<>u know, i was the
one who was offered incentive by sb<>and discouraged by the same body to play the swing<>but
finally, i played it successfully though i am as tall as the swing hen i standup<>and i was the one who
offered incentive to that body later<>hahahahahahah<>don't know why,<t> just feel so
delighted<><t>then had dinner together at his home<>him him is getting more n more naughty<>and
his grandmother is getting more n more troublesome<>i always respect elderly<>but somehow it's
'undingable' when they kept unsatisfying with all sort of things<>i know, i can be happy very
easily<>cause, i just don't want to think too much since it harms me a lot
<PG0216><date>Friday, February 16, 2007<body><> hi, guys, i am in las vegas<>staying at caesars
palace this time<>the room is quite nice but without food and drinks even water...... <>let's recall how
my AMAZING RACE was like to US<>Thu. <>super hea and fast presentation<><t>then, ran out<c>
la<>i called the taxi beforehand<>but it's a bit late<>i spent about 5 mins waiting for it<>when i got on
it , it's about 2:10<>i remembered that taxi driver said the taxi ride woud only take 40 mins<>however,
the driver said coz that day was a bit rainy, 50-55 mins are norally needed without traffic jam at
all<>omg, i had to get to the boarding gate b4 3:30<>yet, i stil had to check in for autie and his
grandma at the airport<>and how can i expect the senior citizens to run with m to the gate <c>lei? <>so
i kept on telling the driver, 'try u best, be the fastest as u can' throughout the ride<>on the other hand,
there was another race for johnny<>he finished his lesson at 2 and then had to rush to kowloon station
to take the airport express<><t>luckily, no big traffic jam at all<><t>managed to get there just before
3<><t>did the check in and finally johnny arrived at about 3:10<>but CX had the flight to us boarding
at gate 48<>which is the farest gate <c>law!!!! <>and the custom was quite crowded<>also, we needed
extra procedure for checking and checking for example if we had bomb again and again<>us is just so
troublesome! <>but still, <t>finally managed to get on the plane<>then, a 12-hour flight<><t>always
heard of cx is better cx is better<>but according to my experience of taking cx to korea and us<>i can't
see anything cx is better<>actaully, the seat is as just as crowded as all other airlines<>certainly, poor
yetta can never sleep on the plane<>but i believe i have much improved this time<>i guessed i slept for
about 15 mins<>coz i didn't know the breakfast was delivered<>GOOD JOB YETTA! <><t>got off the
plane then<>here is what the talk between the custom staff and me<>C: custom, Y: yetta<>C: where are
u going to<>Y: las veags<>C: what will u do there<>Y: i wanna try glambling<>C: oh, u are a
glambler? <>Y: no, but u know, i am just 21, and it's the frist time i can try glamble, so i wanna try<>C:
oh ic, so u can try alcoholic drinks as well<>Y: well, i can but i might not<>C: why not? <>Y: i don't
like the taste<>C: it's normal for the first time<>Y: maybe<>C: how much money have u brought?
<>Y: about 500 us dollars, i mean cash<>C: so, u gonna lose them all? <>Y: i hope not to<>C: haha,
good luck, where are u from<>Y: i am from hk<>C: oh, which part, kowloon or hk island? <>Y: i am
from new territories, did u stay there b4? <>C: yes, i was from hk<>Y: oic<>then i passed the
custom<c> la, even passed fatser than johnny's family<>so i was the one whe went to the baggae claim
belt first<>there were 1 large, 1 medium and 1 small luggage and they were managed to me placed on a
cart entirely by my <>though, their heavy was a problem, it wasn't the major problem<>the problem
was a DOG<>u know, i am scared of..nononon allergic psychological to dogs<>and a dog for finding
drugs kept smelling the luggage when i took mine<>not only smelling, the dog was so hyper<>and it
stood up as tall as a man when it smelt the visitors' rucksak<>oh my god, damn scared..... <>we were in
rush when i departed from hk, and we even didn't ask the staff anything related to baggae claim of
indirect flight<><t>but stil managed to get all the prcedure done correctly<>we would be boarding
again at 3:30<>and we managed to go to terminal 1, which was , again, the farest and <v>get the
boarding pas at about 2:40<>so, as it's deomestic flight we thought we could take a seat and wait b4
lining up again<>so we were too relaxed<>then i went to the washroom, and saw a long queue
extending from the terminal to far outside the terminal<>ha..? 'isn't it the queue we need to line
up?'<>unluckily, it was<>then ran to line up immediatly<>coz the checking procedre could be very
long<><t>anyway, manged to get on the plane in the end<>managed to arrive the the LAS airport<>but
what i saw was really a <c> 'messy burial place'<>the lugguage was in chaos la<>far more chaotic then
u can imagine<>ahi...last time we lost our luggage at LASso i was kind of worried<><t>then, spent
almost half an hour waiting<>but finally our luggage was safe<><t>then got on the car to caesars<>a
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bit traffic jam but still ok la<>took a shower after check in<><t>actually intended to take a bath coz the
bath tub has the spa function<>but i was to tired to do so and just wanna get things done
fast<><t>wanted to sleep but didn't sleep<><t>coz wana to adapt to the jet lag more<><t>then, waited
till about 9, had my very first meal today<>since, remember, i didn;t know the breakfast was
delivered<>the meal was japanese food<>u know, the one u have the cook to cook all the food
immediatley in front of u<>he even burnt an onion mountain in front of us<>was
sosososososososoosososo full then<>at about 12:00, finally slept<>fri. <>thanks to johnny kwok<>i
was awaken up at 5 sth<>now, the time here is 6:42<><%><%>
<PG0218><date>Sunday, February 18, 2007<body><> <c>kung hey fat choi<>it's just about the lunar
new year here<>of coz, it's nth special here<>since firstly it's not a chinese place, secondly, it will be
the nba all star tmr<>fri<><t>saw phantom again<><t>didn't intend to see it<>we thought we would
see sth called the 'blue man group'<>but i don't know why we saw it in the end<><t>didn't have much
expectation since i have already seen the movie and the live drama in hk<>also, i always say that i just
like the songs but the story is really not attractive to me at all<>but i know, everywhere has there own
difference<>so <t>went to see <c>la<>when i got in the theatre<>omg.... it's lovely! <>the setting was
so great and in fact there were boxes and some <c>'fake man' on the sides of the theatre<>and this gave
u a feeling that u are actually in the theatre of the phantom of the opera<>so great!! <>and the actors
were much better than the one we saw in hk<>they sang sosososososoosososo well<>every voice was
so perfect! <>and light of phantom was sosososoosos beautiful<>and when it fell, it fell just 3-4 inches
above my head<>and i could ever imagine i could see fire and even fireworks in an opera<>also, magic
as well<>the phantom kept disappearing and appearing<>it was kind of like the lance burton magic
show<>sosososo great<>sat<>today we went snowboarding in las vegas
can u believe that we have snow in a desert called las vegas<>we were so surprised to see snow
there<>they are real snow coz there are snow not only on the ski route but everywhere near and even
not near the resort<>and most of them are still powder<>the scenery was sosososososo beautiful<>we
encoutered a lot of difficulties in arranging the transport to the resort<>and we could only take sth
which sounds like 'nemo' (i really don't know the spelling') <>the 'nemo' is a car which is as long as a
mini-bus<>the only 1-hour ride was sososososo expensive<>when we almost got off the car, the driver
told us it's about 28F outside<>i guess 28F is about -2C<>when we got out it's really cool<>but then,
we soon started sweating<>sweating a lot<>coz it's a desert<>sososososo hot<>there were some girls
just wearing vest and some boys even not wearing their top<>it wasn;t 28F, it's 28C! <>sososososo
hot<>it's the hottest ski resort that i have ever been to<>we arrived there at 9<>and the lesson started at
11<>so we tried to practice ourselves first<>actually there are some slopes which are quite suitable for
beginners like me<>then , the lesson started<>the first half was too basic which didn't do much good
us<>in the afternoon<>we got another tutor<>he took us to a much higher slope<>and the point is we
managed to get down<>i am so happy that finally i can snowboard though not really good at it<>and
the feel of snowboarding is awesome! <>though i still fell, i can do it, if i have the chance to do it
more often<><t>at nite, had a buffet again<><t>just can't eat much even we didn't eat anything at the
resort<><t>just ate many vegetables<>i mean the uncooked one<>just like eating grass<>now, i am
super tired coz snowboarding is too demanding<>new to sleep <c>la<>happy pig year! <><%>
<PG0222><date>Thursday, February 22, 2007<body><>hi, i am in hk rite now<>but <t>will be
leaving for beijing in 24 hours<>we are really mad about snow sport<>the 1st day of pig<>shit!
<t>really hate the all star nba game in vegas<>the players occupied all the cars<>we had no cars to the
resort<>went to stratoshpere<><t>intended to try the crazy rides there<>but since i was too tired<>i
knew that i <v>have no energy to play<>and i was a bit scared of the rides at that moment<><t>so
didn't try<>went back<>actually the day b4, we did snowboarding for 7 hours endlessly<>so i slept and
slpet again and again<>maybe be i have slept for about 20 hours<>the 2nd day of pig<>all star was
finished but we still had no cars<>since they were living<>they occupied al the cars again! <>shit!
<>kept doing nth<>went to the downtown by myself by bus<>omg, <t> rained cats and dogs<>ahi no
mood<><t>called the host who is called ekmound again for the car<>he said some bullshit like<>'i
have booked the car, but it really depends on the weather, if it's too cold tmr, u still can't go'<>ha...what
the f?????????????? <><t>really wanna kill him<>he said he would confirm us later<>but we waited
till 1am, he didn't confirm<>of coz, we kept calling him again and again<>but <t>can;t reached
him<><t>kept packing things by my own<>really hate johnny kwok<>how come he just slpet and i had
to do all the packing for him????? <><t>just slept for about 1 hour<>3rd day<>after the 1 hour
sleep<>to be continued
<PH0102><date>Tuesday, January 02, 2007<body><> happy new year everyone!! (yea it's definitely a
bit late but it's always better be late than nth...hahaa...)<> <t>had some great time on new year's eve.
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<t>went to the winter carnival and had fun there (tho i didnt play all the games coz no one was brave
enough...hahaaaa). thx sisi for winning all the toys for me~<><t>then went to a party in a cafe @ cwb.
a reli small place and tightly packed with ppl.<t> drank and played for a few round until someone
started quarrelling with his gf. <t>then spent rest of the day talking to them and trying to help them
make up...(<t>didnt realise that the guy reli wanna break up and reli thought that its a complete waste of
time trying to talk to the girl...) a strange new start of 2007... <>first day of the year was sleeping day.
<t><v>wake up in the afternoon and went a bit of shopping. got a nice zip-up which i wanted for some
time, thx sisi~ <>and now i'm stuck in my new seat...alone...poor me... <>(thx for my lovely colleagues
for visiting me <c>le~)
<PH0103><date>Wednesday, January 03, 2007<body><> gosh...<t>seems like i'm gettting a flu...
<><T>dun wanna get sick...(altho i get lose i few pounds if i did...) <>new years' plan: <>1. lose a few
pounds<>2. get clothes for work<>3. get a new mobile<>4. not going out drinking too often (coz it
ruins plan #1) <>5. find a new job<>6. (to be filled in later...)
<PH0104><date>Thursday, January 04, 2007<body><> maybe the world will end tmr<>maybe
everything will end<>maybe there's only myself<>i dun have hope<>zero<>maybe everything will turn
zero tmr
<PH0105><date>Friday, January 05, 2007<body><>it usually takes much effort to make the first
step<>u need experience, courage and faith, from zero to one<>after stepping out, things would become
smooth and easy<>thank you for holding my hands to make my first move<>i reli appreciate your help
and support my dear friends<>and of coz u, who give me a chance to step out, allow me to stand by
your side again<>love u loads, i'm so sorry and reli dun wanna lose u
<PH0114><date>Sunday, January 14, 2007<body><><t> went shopping w/ fiona today, bought an
awful lot of stuff, <T>seems like i needa spend what i didnt last week... <>i bought: a scarf, a tee, a
long-sleeves tee, a cropped sweater, a long sweater, a skirt, pair of pants... <>i can wear a new item
everyday next week, hahhaaa! so happy~<>cheer up fiona! u acted so differently today that it seems so
unlike u...wake up!
<PH0115><date>Monday, January 15, 2007<body><t> finally back to work today, it's soooo nice to
see my lovely colleagues again! (and thank u so much again n again for your card n flowers~ they r reli
nice!!) tho i reli dun like waking up early, esp when i couldnt sleep well last nite... <>the bad news is i
needa work on the worksheets again...gosh...i thought i dun have to deal with it anymore (which
is not reli true, i jus knew i gotta work on those when i got back...) <>anyway had great lunch w/ angie,
she told me all the things that happened when i wasnt here, well...<t>seems like i missed some drama
when i'm gone... <>now i'm working on the worksheets (as always), and falling asleep...zzzzz...
<PH0116><date>Tuesday, January 16, 2007<body><> <t>went to the hospital to visit mabel, a place
which haunts my dreams...anyway it was very different when u went there n visit sb~<>hope u'll get
well soon <c>la mabel, and remember dun scratch on them coz they r gonna leave a mark! <><t>seems
like u r being very emotional these days... <>research abt my illness: <>- Despite the finding that
a baterial infection is the cause of ulcers in 75% of cases, there is ongoing support for stress as a
possible cause for ulcers. <>- Tobacco smoking, blood group, spices and other factors that were
suspected to cause ulcers until late in the 20th century, are actually of relatively minor importance in the
development of peptic ulcers. For nearly 100 years, scientists and doctors thought that ulcers were
caused by stress, spicy food, and alcohol. Treatment involved bed rest and a bland diet. Later,
researchers added stomach acid to the list of causes and began treating ulcers with antacids. <>Another major cause is the use of NSAIDs. <>- A family history is often present in duodenal ulcers,
especially when blood group O is also present.
<PH0116><date>Tuesday, January 16, 2007<body><> <t><v>not having motivation to do work today,
<t><v>jus keep on falling asleep n surfing the net...but at least i finished what should be due tmr...
<>fiona came over for dinner tonite, <t>had a RELI full dinner (plus snacks, fruit and dessert not long
after)... guess i'll become a little fat gal very soon! <><t>loads of movies i wanna watch...(i wrote a list
of movies i wanna watch and checked out their trailers today during work...see how 'focused' i am at
work!)
<PH0118><date>Thursday, January 18, 2007<body><>sometimes little things matter a greater deal
than big things... <>looking at my manicured nails cheers me up<>reading and texting short msgs
makes me feel warm<>having the same drink (w/o knowing beforehand) makes me feel
close<>listening to a song freshens me up<>there r always different ways to make urself happy, jus stay
positive and u'll find happiness
<PH0124><date>Wednesday, January 24, 2007<body><> <t>abt time to be off from work and jus dun
wanna do anything else (tho i was spotted by my big boss twice that i wasnt working hard
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today...gosh...) <>Copied from dinner~ <>As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that wasn't
supposed to ever let you down probably will. <>You will have your heart broken, probably more than
once, and it's harder every time. <>You'll break hearts too, so remember how it felt when yours was
broken. <>You'll fight with your best friend. <>You'll blame a new love for things an old one did.
<>You'll cry because time is passing too fast, and you'll eventually lose someone you love. So take too
many pictures, laugh too much, and love like you've never been hurt because every sixty seconds you
spend upset is a minute of happiness you'll never get back. <>Find a guy who calls you beautiful
instead of hot; who calls you back when you hang up on him; who will stay awake just to watch you
sleep. <>Wait for the guy who kisses your forehead; who wants to show you off to the world when you
are in your sweats; who holds your hand in front of his friends. <>Wait for the one who is constantly
reminding you of how much he cares about you and how lucky he is to have you. <>Wait for the one
who turns to his friends and says, "..that's her."
<PH0131><date>Wednesday, January 31, 2007<body><> <t>finally finished a whole lot of
worksheets, hurray!! (but it's only part of it...i still got some more to go <$>)<>anyway it feels
good aftering clearing some of my jobs!! yeaaaaaaa.... <>now i have to deal with the reading day stuff
on friday...hmm... <>my shopping mood's coming back, think i'll have to get sth tonite <$>
<PH0212><date>Monday, February 12, 2007<body><> <t>feeling so gloomy at the weekends...
<>there's time when i wanna say absolutely nth, and there's time when i wanna shout until i'm out of
breath... <>but now it's time to cheer up again!! wake up gal!!
<PH0215><date>Thursday, February 15, 2007<body><> what's happening to my xanga?? how come
they all come back again?? <>my tictic and chicken little??? <><%>
<PH0217><date>Saturday, February 17, 2007<body><> an impromptu crazy night~
<PH0303><date>Saturday, March 03, 2007<body><><t> had a doc appointment today, <t>spent 2
hours waiting for a 5 minute's consultation, such a waste of time!! <><t>then went back to the office for
a meeting at abt 2, <t>finished the meeting at 5, <t>worked on other stuff and off work... <><t>watched
a film which makes my heart aches so badly... <>gosh... <><t>cant hold my tears at all... <><t>too bad
that i needa pick up on my tutoring again...<t>reli hate it that i gotta work on SAT!!! it's supposed to be
my holiday!! <><t>hate it more when i gotta prepare stuff for tutoring!!
<PH0305><date>Monday, March 05, 2007<body><> <t>started tutoring again last weekend.
<t>worked from 11am to 6pm... it's so tiring yet familiar...bet i couldnt reli leave this job, i actually
quite like the kids in my class! (altho they r lazy and dun listen to me...) <><t>then went home and had
dinner w/ my family.<t> spent the rest of the nite doing nth and lying on my bed... <><t>sunday went
'morning tea' w/ mom n dad. <t>then a stupid gal dropped her phone in the sink w/ the running tap
on!!!! gosh!! how can i be so stupid!!! then i got no choice but to check out some latest phone,<t> didnt
get a new one at last tho, <t>dun reli hav one which i reli like and suits all my needs... <><t>at nite had
dinner at some 'interesting' korean restaurant, we kept on receiving food which we didnt order, the
waiter said it's becoz they didnt have those... the funniest thing's that they jus didnt bother to tell us that
they didnt have it, they jus served us with other food!! <><t>seems like i couldnt get what i want all
day... <>where's my passion? where's my energy? <>i wanna be the same old me again...
<PH0306><date>Tuesday, March 06, 2007<body><> gosh... <>i RELI RELI gotta be on time to work
tmr!!!!
<PH0312><date>Monday, March 12, 2007<body><> <t>had been soooooo busy last week that it took
me a long time to catch up with my frds' xangas... <>last week was reli a disaster, <t><v>work till late
every day for the hard launch, <t>had spring dinner n smiled all nite to the guests, <t>had a whole day
work on sat...reli killed me!! <><t>reli want some rest, lemme sleep for the whole day!! tho it's reli nice
to go lunch with my mom n dad on sunday and went to h&m and bought myself loads of goodies with
bargain price, then great dinner with my dear frds and movie afterwards...yea~
<PH0313><date>Tuesday, March 13, 2007<body><> still busy... <><t>gotta go here and there in the
coming mth, visiting schools, going to seminars, going to sheung shui (agian!)... <>jus for this week,
i'm going to sheung shui tmr, workshop on wed, some other schools on thurs and fri (maybe) and a
seminar on sat... <>will i become a workaholic? (probably not...maybe...)
<PH0314><date>Wednesday, March 14, 2007<body><> how come i had soooo many paper cuts this
week...and it's only wed...gosh, it hurts! <><t>ad loads of school visits this week, <t>must be a tiring
week for me...and i dun understand why they had to be in the morning...in far away places... (like Kwai
Chung & Tin Shui Wai...) <>i told myself i wont buy anything this week, but i bought myself a top, a
skirt, a belt and a bag yesterday... <>n i kept having this headache...when will it leave me?
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Appendix 2 – Dialogues of online instant messaging: data from MSN Messenger
MSN data
Adolescences ranging from 20-25
a: hey. r u going to annual dinner?
b: should be ........
a: ok. wok ma recently?
b: no
a: good wor.
b: u?
a: wok ar. but one more week za la.
b: add oil!!
a: thx ar.
a: how abt others?
a: hey anthony. hv u met ur counselor?
b: no ar
a: see....
a: where r u now?
b: u?
b: HK
a: not yet ar
b: has he/she found u?
a: received an e-mail lor.
a: i'm wondering why my counselling so late jeh
b: even i meet her everyday in office, but she seem no intention to find me..
b: so late?
a: do u know anybody in our batch already had counselling?
b: no ar..seems no wor
a: really? our admin is so slow wor
b: realte to admin??
a: i guess they arrange the schedule of counseling
b: seems hai the counsellor arrange it themselves
a: oic. ur counsellor is janet?
b: no ar
c: hi understood the flight schedule part already or not?
d: i think yes ba
c: then gd:) quickly work on SQL and try to solve my problem la i just start diary :'(
d: i cant remember which problem
c: the foreign key of reservation-flight instance relation cant reference back
d: y?
d: foreign key in flight doesnt it?
c: foreign key of "reservation-flight_instance" relation refer to flight_instance
d: yes primary key of flight instance are date flight_number n airline_name
d: i refer all of them
c: me 2, but cant
c: y i cant?
c: hv u tried yet?
d: yes
d: so many comment
c: ya cos TAs sucks
c: i know y u can cos u didnt include airplane info in flight instance
d: include pk of airplane in flight instance is ok?
c: pk of airplane should also include model
d: oh thx
d: here?
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c: ya
d: is it there is no such expression? (ab*)*
c: i think have
d: thx
c: is it?
d: i think hv so ask ask u
c: (empty) a ab abab ababab..... aa aaa......
d: u also not yet sleep ge
c: just prepare to offline lol
d: wanna ask wht is ur ans of q4c
c: wat is q4c?
d: nth la
e: wei, did u find Kung Kung last Sat?
f: he was in Guang Xi on Sat.... so i finally go back office.... print his signature onto the scanned log
sheet, and submited the copy to HKIA..... >"<]
f: i told kung kung yesterday about that...
f: in fact i cannot find kung kung on neither Friday and Sat, and i sent message to Mrs. Kung on
Friday night!!!!! haha she called me back on Sat morning.... ^^"
e: ha? he was in Guang Xi ma? did he back HK yesterday?
f: probably he has been backed on Sat night
e: can i ask u sometHing?
f: sure
e: 1. 06461 - the revised design about the A&A T.Room I should revised the Dwg by myself first / I
should required HKC to
e: no
e: i havent finished
e: 1. 06461 - the revised design about the A&A T.Room I should revised the Dwg by myself first / I
should required HKC to draft for me, if i revised first , how do u know about the size of the
canopy as i dun know the duct size.
e: 2. had u read the minutes of 03322? any comment? ^^
f: 1. u can ask HKC to give u draft design (he promised ma) including the duct size etc. Once u get
the basic information or even the proposed design from him, u can quickly draw the design and
confirmed by kung kung
f: 2........................minutes..... not yet read....... how about u send me the files and then i comment /
correct it within today? then u can give the revised minutes to kung kung to comment and can
issue out by tmr
e: then i should contact Mr Leung, did he promise ?
f: yes, i asked him during the previous meeting :P
f: even if he hasn't promised that, he is the M&E consultant of the project and he has the
responsibility to give us information
e: ok, thank you so much ar, Ar Ki!!!!
f: no thx la~
f: my email: arkifan@gmail.com
e: cos i remenber that during my year-out, Mr Leung was a lazy guy
f: YES!
e: can i send through msn
e: he has A-shoulder
f: if u dun ask him, he won't do anything
f: but if u ask, then he will do!!!! (quite quick tim...)
f: haha i forgot msn can transfer files tim.....
e: sorry ar, u should continue your study la addoil
f: ok la~ next time u play / dinner with us upon our request la~~ hahaha :P
f: becky, far east estimate signage installation would be completed on "late Jan 07" ?
e: ar........banny ng called me asking about the schedule!!!!!
e: u remember other version?
f: far east submitted a programme before previous meeting, u can check check. And far east have to
revised their programme incoporating the signage submission we just made, u can force them to
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do so :P
f: after u check their revised programme, u can give it to Hotel for their reference, and u can let Hotel
know that, u are doing sth to control the programme
e: where did u file the programme from FE?
f: hehe, in the folder in the A4 box on the floor between our seat
(926words)
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Appendix 3 – Data from casual conversations
Conversations
a: 19-year-old girl, First Year
b: 19-year-old girl, First Year
c: 18-year-old girl, First Year
3mins
a: Do you have any brothers and or sister
b: yes, I have a brother she’s young I’m older than him one years
c: I have a brother he is form 3 now and he is very he is very um 好狂燥呀 very
b: um do you mean your brother is very easy to make other angry
c: yes
b: oh I see
a: um which which class for your brother wants to study science or arts in form 4
c: science but his his Chinese subject is very bad I encourage him to read more books but he doesn’t
want to listen to my sug suggestion la
b: oh I see
b: then what about what about your brother
a: my brother is eight years old so she he is only primary two and he like break dance yeah because I
I ask him why like break dance he said because he want to be um more more friends
b: oh I see
b: um my brother is a form 5 student and next month he will have a HKCE exam and um this in this
period in last few months in last few week he has a mock exam I see I find him is very
hardworking about the exam yep
a: I will move to a new home next week um it is near the school I think I can get up later now
e: 17-year-old boy, Year 10
f: 17-year-old boy, Year 10
g: 17-year-old boy, Year 10
3mins
e: and you you say that you will go to ive what class will you study
f: I think I will study um um study um account because because my friend talked to me the in ive
account subject have many beautiful girl
g: oh but you have drop the account subject in form 5 do you know how to study
f: I think I I know how to study I drop um I drop account at form 5 because account um I think I in
the past I think account is a good subject in the communication have a have a many good points
also the communication have um many um many accountant so study account have a good future
but I drop this 科 because I feel really hard of it also I don’t’ want to waste my time at HKCEE
do not um HKCEE and get the bad mark in the past um in LKS College the BC 班 students um
the account mark is very low only can get E or F grade
e: you talked so long time and the main point is the beautiful girl right
f: yes I think so
h: 25-year-old girl, Teacher
i: 24-year-old girl, Account Executive
3mins
h: hello joey
i: hello wingon
h: um how are you today
i: um not very well I was sick um and need rest I get the get cold ok
h: you should drink more water ok
h: um did you join the um the beach activity last um yesterday
i: no because I have to teach piano yesterday and I cannot go to [inaudible] so I just give up haha
h: oh me too because yesterday is the birthday of chiwai’s father um its um the 60s um years old
i: oh so great
h: It’s big birthday haha it’s
i: so where did you have dinner with them
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h: um we have the dinner at a restaurant in tun mum there are so many relatives and friends of um his
father
i: so any present that chiwai give his gave his father
h: um the the charge of the dinner it’s great number and also I bought a watch for him
i: um ok
h: ah I know you will have your wedding next year how’s your preparation work
i: I took the wedding photo in may and it’s still under the editing now and and I will wear um
wedding promote gown yep
h: oh I see I hope you’ll have a very good memory of your wedding
i: Hope everything can run smoothly
h: I will pray for you
i: Thank you
i: So how’s your school work
h: um now is quite fine because the students will have will have their summer holiday very soon so
we have um not very busy when compare with last last few months
i: so um any planning in summer holiday
h: um I will go a trip go for a trip in Japan for seven days
i: oh it is expensive for going to japan right
i: um no um we we have book a a hostel other than the hotel um so the the spending will will be will
be more much cheaper
h: oh so good so will you buy a lot of thing in japan because everything so expensive in japan and
you’ll bankrupt
i: um um I think we we prefer to to have a trip um oversea other than buy so many things
h: ok so will you join the camp in late july
i: oh yes yes um sure I I I think it is a very important thing of our fellowship so we must join it
(852words)
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Appendix 4a – A sample text of Pure English entry from blogging
<PH0410>
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
"Once upon a time, I wanted to know what love was.
You just have to see that it's wrapped in beauty and hidden away in between the seconds of your life.
If you don't stop for a minute, you might miss it. "
- Ben Willis, Cashback
didnt get much sleep last nite, the usual case after the long holiday...
i'm so tired and feeling sick...gosh...
why cant the holiday lasts a little longer? at least wait until i'm feeling better ma!
10:31 AM - add eprops - add comments - email it
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The University of Edinburgh
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Appendix 4b – A sample text of English-dominant code-switching entry from
blogging
<PB0220>
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Happy New Year everybody!!!
I had two full dinner these days...( but nowhere to do excercise!!!!)
年 30 晚:
Played badminton with Ching and his secondary school friends, hm....his friends do not
really know how to play badminton...even the guys...
watched 雙子神偷....honestly, once you watched the first scene at the very beginning,
you know it's a movie made in PRC.
The action scene was fair...i mean i can clearly noticed that all the dangerous actions
performed by twins were actually done by their 'replacement'.
And the wrost part is the ending, many ppl said ' 唔係呀, 呢個就係結局喇'
年初一
Went to telelolo's parents home in the afternoon, first went to his granny's home first,
got lots of red packets ( big thanks to his relatvieSSSSSSSSSSSSS). Then had dinner
with the Ip's family. Ate lots of things but didn't feel satisfied except gulity.
Eagar to do some excercise ...
年初二
intended to sing Karoke at night but ended up going for movies, had Japanese suishi in
MK.
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Watched 'the long n lyrics'. wah....好垃圾
冇成本, 冇劇情, 冇 message
完全係一部講英文 0 既港產 pin.
To conclude
如果大家想新年去睇戲
會 suggest 睇門徒
年初三
birthday of telelolo's mother.
cant escape those oily restaruant food.
9:58 AM - add eprops - add comments - email it
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Year of Presentation: 2007
Appendix 4c – A sample text of Cantonese-dominant code-switching entry from
blogging
<PN0225>
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Friends w/ Benefits
一段 Friends with Benefits (想知什麼是 Friends with Benefits, 去 Yahoo ask/ answer
去找找答案吧!) 的關係, 真的很可怕!!! 他可能是對你很有好感, 覺得你很吸引, (當然, 你
也覺得他很吸引吧) 有人可以很灑脫, 但是, 對一些人, 特別是女孩子, 對自己的 FWB 沒有
emotional attachment 根本是不太可能吧! 所以, 往往結局都是為人所預料的... 沒法子
和他有更一步發展, 又沒法子大方的當他的朋友... 就是這樣, 一段可貴的友誼就此蒙上了污
點.
有污點的友誼, 還有保留的價值嗎? 還是, 這根本不是友誼?
7:05 PM - 10 eprops - 10 comments - email it
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Appendix 4d – A sample text of Pure Cantonese entry form blogging
<PT0328>
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
日日都要點蚊香，好慘....快 d 到開冷氣既時間，咁我就可以唔洗咁慘啦
今日幫 d 學生調位，有個女學生就一如以往坐老師桌，佢對住成班講要永遠守互住我，呆晒.....
教師團契踏出左第一步，好開心，對學校歸屬感大左，唱完詩歌成個人開心左。
11:28 PM - add eprops - add comments - email it
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