Talking About Food
When having a meal with other people, we often make comments on the dishes. If we make comment on a dish immediately after trying it, we can treat the comments as realization and use the sentence particle 喎 wo3. Notice below we also use other sentence particles depending on the meaning of the sentence.
Positive Comments
- We can use 同埋 tung4 maai4 (‘and’) to introduce an additional positive comment.
- We can use 不過 bat1 gwo3 (‘but’) to introduce a negative comment.
Negative Comments
- We can use 同埋 tung4 maai4 (‘and’) to introduce an additional negative comment.
- We can use 不過 bat1 gwo3 (‘but’) to introduce a positive comment.
We can also indicate the food we are commenting on. Here are some examples:
If we want to ask for other people’s comments, we can say:
- We can contract 好唔好 hou2 m4 hou2 to 好冇 hou2 mou2.
If we order our own food individually and want to ask for someone’s comments on their own food, we can say:
To answer the questions, we can use the expressions for positive or negative comments mentioned above. If the questions are asked immediately after we have tried a dish, we can treat the comments as realization and continue using the sentence particle 喎 wo3. However, if the questions are asked after we have been eating the dish for a while, we don’t usually treat the comments as realization. In that case, we can replace 喎 wo3 with 呀 aa3, while keeping other sentence particles unchanged. Here are some examples:
The server may sometimes ask how we feel about the food.
- The person 你哋 nei5 dei6 (‘you’) is omitted between 啱 ngaam1 (‘to suit’) and 食 sik6 (‘to eat’) because it is obvious in the context.
If we want to check if something is spicy, we can ask: