Tommy says…

Went and volunteered at the National Chinese Eisteddfod today. It was an interesting experience. Only annoying thing was that about half the people who told me they would come, didn’t. Apparently the organisers didn’t send out emails to the whole list of people I supplied. Grrr……

It made it worse that the organisers put me in the “privileged” main hall, which mainly hosted group recitals. I feel

The performance of some of the non-native speaker competitors were amazingly good! And the main judge, Professor Daniel Kane, spoke perfect Mandarin. Much better than most Chinese people I know!

It was disappointing, though, that none of the Cantonese native speaker contestants chose to perform classical poetry. They all concentrated on “easy” pieces, where the emotion was more directly manifest, and thus easier to perform. This was a pity because Cantonese is much closer to Middle Chinese in terms of rhythm and tone than Mandarin, and so classical poetry sounds better performed in Cantonese.