你好!

My name is Rachel. I am a Cantonese teacher & language lover, line cook, world traveller and powerlifter. I was born and raised in Hong Kong.

My native language is Cantonese, I also speak Mandarin, English, Spanish, as well as some Japanese and Portuguese.

How it all started...

I was having the time of my life backpacking across Central America when I sustained a serious injury that left me unable to walk for a few months.

Lying in the hospital bed with a broken leg and cloudy mind, I was struggling to figure out what's next. I thought, I love learning languages on my own, I speak a bunch of them, wouldn't hurt to try to teach my native language, right?

I signed up on a tutoring website without much expectation, thinking to myself this was probably gonna fail because who the heck wants to learn Cantonese?! It's such a complex and colloquial language that I thought no one would be interested to learn.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Fast forward 4 months later, I am a proud teacher of accumulatively 60 dedicated students from all around the world.

It has been my absolute honor teaching them and growing with them. Nothing brings me more joy than to see my students taking big strikes to reach fluency in Canto, and as a bonus, getting to know them as the lovely individuals that they are in the process.

The opportunity to teach them also provided me with the perspective of the struggles of learning Cantonese. There has been so many times when I research on the internet on a certain Cantonese concept as part of lesson preparation, and I struggled to find resources of good quality! The lack of quality resources, the limited availability of materials that include Jyutping, all made my students' learning journey much more challenging. As a passionate language learner myself who relies heavily on online resources, I decided to contribute to the cause.

Through teaching my students, I got to see what concepts Cantonese learners struggle with the most; through my own language learning experiences, I got a sense of what kind of resources works best for online learning. So I took these two key ingredients, and BAM! The birth of Cantonese After Hours.

Cantonese is a truly marvellous language. I have never seen another language quite like it. The tones, final particles, pronunciations fascinate me even as a native speaker. The things that make Cantonese so beautiful are the same things that make this language hard to learn. But don't be discouraged! If you want to learn Cantonese to speak with in-laws, grandparents, grew up overseas and want to rediscover the connection to your roots, having just moved to Hong Kong and have no idea where to even start, I've got you!

Disclaimer

I am not a linguist or Cantonese expert by any means. My mission is to explain Cantonese concepts from the perspective of a Hong Kong local and Cantonese teacher, making them easy to understand, practical, and relevant to everyday conversations in Hong Kong's cultural context.