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Though all 17 spots in the class, which is through the City Extension program, are taken and a waitlist is underway, the program is considering adding a second section of the course if demand continues, according to Stephanie Chenard, interim dean for City Extension.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a movement that is just getting started,\u201d said instructor Crystal Chan, a 24-year-old marketing professional who grew up near Chinatown\u2019s Portsmouth Square Park with her grandparents and parents.<\/p>\n
As a child, Chan naturally picked up the Taishanese and Cantonese spoken around her. But in school, she said, neither language was part of the curriculum. At both Lowell High School and Yale University, Chan said, the only Chinese language class available to her was Mandarin, which is less common in many U.S.-based Chinatowns, but is widely spoken internationally. (After English, Mandarin is ranked as one of the most useful<\/a> languages to learn, largely for this reason.)<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just always very saddening that these languages aren\u2019t taught in a standardized school curriculum,\u201d Chan said. It \u201cfelt like our language didn\u2019t matter.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The city and county of Taishan, in Guangdong province, had high poverty, poor farmland, and ready access to the South China Sea in the 1800s and early 1900s. All of that led to wave after wave migration from there to the Bay Area between 1869, when the first transcontinental railroad was completed, to 1965, when the Hart-Cellar Act <\/a>opened up the United States to many more immigrants from other regions of Asia, including Hong Kong and other parts of mainland China, said Laura Ng, an assistant professor of anthropology at Grinnell College.<\/p>\n Today, some half a million<\/a> Chinese Americans are of Taishanese descent. And the San Francisco Bay Area has been the home for a much higher percentage of them, because for a long time, San Francisco served as the first stop for those who entered the country, said Ng. From then on, they\u2019ve built various family associations locally, such as the Ning Yung Benevolent Association, to look out for each other.<\/p>\n Ng, a child of Taishenese immigrants, is one of a handful of scholars studying the Taishanese diaspora in the United States. Precise data on this group is scarce, she noted, because Taishanese immigrants didn\u2019t leave much in the way of records in their wake. They often took up jobs that don\u2019t require much English, working in construction, or the garment industry, or in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants.<\/p>\n Many younger members of Taishanese-speaking families ultimately adapt to Cantonese, said Joy Zhan, who immigrated to the United States from Taishan with her parents in 2005, and is now acting director of the San Francisco Youth Commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cantonese is the most widely spoken language in Hong Kong and the broader Canton area, and while it, too, is rarely taught in local schools, it has become more accessible to descendants of immigrant Chinese communities in the United States, in part because of the popularity of Cantonese-language news channels like KTSF or TV dramas from TVB \u2014 the Hong Kong television network.<\/p>\n While it takes some practice for Cantonese speakers to understand Taishanese, the languages are similar enough that limited communication between speakers of the two languages is possible. Many words in Taishanese are completely different from Cantonese. But one rule of thumb is to drop the first D in any Cantonese word, said Ng. The Cantonese word for big, \u201cdaai,\u201d for example, is \u201cai\u201d in Taishanese.\u00a0<\/p>\n Growing up, Zhan remembers some of her friends responding in Cantonese to Taishanese-speaking grandparents with mixed results. While the grandparents often understood what the kids were saying, the grandchildren could only understand \u201cbits and pieces\u201d of what their grandparents were trying to communicate.<\/p>\n On a recent trip back to Taishan, Zhan heard from family that nowadays kids in the area don\u2019t speak Taishenese at home anymore. They speak Mandarin instead. \u201cThat makes me so sad,\u201d said Zhan, \u201cwhat if my nephew and nieces actually lose our dialect?\u201d In her work with the Youth Commission and other local organizations, she said, she loves being able to speak to elders in their own language.<\/p>\n \u201cThe grandparents who speak Taishanese, a lot of times they\u2019re the ones who need the most help navigating all the different services,\u201d said Zhan. Taishanese is widely spoken at food lines and among recipients of Medi-Cal and food stamp benefits. In local politics, Cantonese language skills are a valuable asset for people working at City Hall, and the same is true of Taishanese, particularly because most of San Francisco\u2019s city services only cover Cantonese and Mandarin<\/a>.<\/p>\n With that in mind, Conversational Taishanese 101 has practical, rather than academic, goals.<\/p>\n The class, which will not be graded, will teach skills directly applicable to everyday conversation, including tones and phonetics, greetings, ordering food, and offering help to elders.\u00a0<\/p>\n Chan hopes the class will be \u201cmore of a community space\u201d that will help students connect to their roots and culture. No knowledge of Chinese is required, she said, and she will tailor the instruction to the background and skill level of the participants.\u00a0<\/p>\n The goals for the class are similarly practical. Maybe a student will be able to help a senior who is struggling to communicate with a bus driver. Maybe they will be able to ask \u201cWhat are you looking for?\u201d when they see seniors rummaging through the trash for recyclables, for example, and offer them some help, said Chan.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mostly, she hopes her future students will \u201c serve as a bridge,\u201d said Chan.<\/p>\n We won’t ignore your neighborhood<\/p>\n When a San Francisco neighborhood has a Mission Local reporter, it means someone is there. We’re following new housing projects proposed on your block, keeping tabs on what your district supervisor is up to at City Hall, and letting you know when longtime businesses close (and new ones open). When big news breaks, we already know the context.<\/p>\n Most neighborhoods don’t have that. Yours could.\u00a0<\/p>\n That’s what Mission Local is building. Our reporters don’t parachute in — they write consistently on San Francisco, so you’re never reading about your neighborhood from someone who just looked it up.<\/p>\n So far we are in five of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. But we know all San Franciscans deserve our kind of coverage. Will you join us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since the late 1860s, Taishanese (also known as Toisanese or Hoisanwa) has been one of the most common…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[13005,2872,14,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-390577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-chinatown","tag-immigrants","tag-immigration","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1783517949_844_062026_ZM_AteTessPWM-27-930x620.jpg\")
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