Interviews with Japanese in Utah: MItsugi Kasai

Page 47

LK wasn't true. Japanese and Chinese is a complete different language. Well, here again, the Army men made a mistake too, that they thought if you spoke Chinese, you can understand any Chinese, but of course the Chinese have about fourteen dialects in the Chinese language and, of course, about twenty­four or twenty-three Mainland and one is Cantonese. Another one is oh, I used to name them all. Huka is another one, Fukin another one. But Mandarin is the main one. Of course, that's the standard Chinese dialect now. Of course, they taught Chinese-Mandarin at the language school and, of course, they started the Chinese Cantonese at the time I attended. They thought that if I knew it was Chinese-Cantonese I could also speak or understand any Chinese language. Well, that's where they made their mistake. Can­tonese, Japanese, all these other dialects so I wasn't too effective. There was some Chinese­Cantonese speaking PW's, yes, but those who spoke those dialects weren't important to me. All the so-called, the leaders of the PW's, they all spoke Mandarin and understood Mandarin so my knowledge of the Cantonese wasn't much help to me and, of course, I had, I had, I was later joined by Alfie LeMay. But he had studied Mandarin the same time I studied Cantonese at the school. Want some more of this? 46