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Colloquial comparisons in Cantonese

_This is a guest post by Źmicier Kušnaroŭ, who frequents [Tatoeba](http://tatoeba.org/ "Tatoeba: Collecting example sentences") as [Demetrius](http://tatoeba.org/rus/user/profile/Demetrius "Demetrius - Tatoeba"). Źmicier is primarily interested in Chinese, mostly Cantonese and Wenyan. Here he explains basic comparisons in Cantonese using 過 and 啲._
If you have read this blog, you already know [how to make comparisons in Mandarin](/china/zhongwen/simple-comparisons/). This post deals with Cantonese.

Making comparisons in Cantonese is even simpler than Mandarin, because the word order is like English.

The basic structure

The basic structure is:

[noun 1] [adj] 過 [noun 2]

It corresponds to English:

[noun 1] is more [adj] than [noun 2]

Basically, comparing two things in Cantonese is very similar to English, just replace “than” with 過 (gwo) (or just go in colloquial pronunciation).

So, here are some examples:

我架車快過你架車。 Ngóh gā chē faai gwo néi gā chē. My car is faster than your car.

我間屋大過你間。 Ngóh gāan ūk daaih ngóh gāan. My house is bigger than yours.

我酷過你。 Ngóh huhk gwo néih. I'm cooler than you.

Omitting the second object

Sometimes you want just to omit the second noun when it is obvious. Well, in English you can just drop “than [noun 2] ”. In Chinese, you can’t: 我架車快 means “My car is fast”. To convey the meaning “My car is faster”, we use 啲 (dī).

The structure is as follows:

[noun] [adjective] 啲 .

It corresponds to English:

[noun] is more [adjective] .

So, here is the example:

我客氣啲。 Ngóh haakhei dī. I am more polite.


Contact me: mhg@eastasiastudent.net

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