English Fluency for Hong Kong Tour Guides is an issue.

**Me Jamie, your host, I am English and I have lived in Hong Kong for 53 years - I know the place.**

**I have personally completed 2,340+ Private Tours and Experiences (over 6,500+ guests) since April 2011 and I am considered one of the finest Private Tour Guides in Asia.**

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Insider tip - The Importance of English Fluency for Tours in HK

English Fluency for Hong Kong Tour Guides is an issue.

click on the image to enlarge

The Union Jack - and yes, that describes me, I have English, Welsh, Scottish and French Heritage and I am also a proud Yorkshireman. I speak one language and that is English and I speak it rather well and my lack of Cantonese has never,ever been an issue in the 53 years I have lived in Hong Kong.

I have written about this quite a few times on my blog and I decided to give my new talent of researching AI a work out on seeing that it could come up with on the issue of how you choose a tour guide in Hong Kong, for any sort of tour and not just Private Tours which I specialise in and I was the first in 2010 to offer them in Hong Kong.

The quality of your Hong Kong Tour | Experience is absolutely dependent on the quality of the guide you choose to book, please choose wisely.

So far I have wasted almost 5 hours on trying to get a reply that I understand from AI, I have learnt over the past few months that when you ask a question it has to be very detailed and you have to put a lot of thought into it - the omission or addition of a single word can throw the entire response off onto a different tangent and after 5 hours my conclusion is AI does not know much about Hong Kong or Hong Kong Culture and knows almost nothing about the Tour Business in Hong Kong.

So with that in mind here a few facts

I have lived in Hong Kong for 53 years since 1972, 25 years under British Rule and 28 years under Chinese Rule.
I have been married for a long, long time, we have 3 sons aged 25, 32 and 42.
My wife is NOT Chinese but is Asian, born and bred in Hong Kong, she has lived here her entire life, she went to local Chinese Schools and her first language is Cantonese and she is completely fluent in English
2 of our sons have my gift for languages in other words English ONLY, our middle son is just about fluent in Cantonese and has a Hong Kong Chinese girlfriend.
Most of my wife’s family in Hong Kong are Hong Kong Chinese, all my nephews and nieces here are half Hong Kong Chinese and my wife’s entire family are all fluent in Cantonese and English
There is nothing I can do about my Cantonese Language Deficiency, I simply do NOT have the gift and trust me I have tried, my long suffering wife gave up trying to tutor me a long time ago and as I have previously stated in blog posts I can tell you that most Hong Kong Chinese people have no confidence that any white foreigner could possible speak fluent Cantonese and they are not wrong, more to the point, I am a Gweilo which literally translates to white devil or white ghost, I have been called this word or phrase since I was a kid, it does not bother me, this is Hong Kong Culture and does not detract from the fact that Hong Kong Chinese people are by and large absolutely wonderful people
Now, I do have a little understanding of the Cantonese language, not much, but enough to know when they are telling a joke at my expense and over the years I have perfected the dumb foreigner look and trust me I know how I am regarded by certain people, culture is culture - my wife will translate later, a lot of local residents assume my wife does not speak Cantonese either this is not exactly a problem specific to Hong Kong and you learn to shrug it off, I do my part I probably speak to about 20+ neighbours daily where I live + the security guards, they get to learn some more English and perhaps learn that I am just a regular person like them, it is all part and parcel of living in a multi cultural society albeit with Chinese people making up 92% of the population!

Now to make it clear, it does not bother me at all anymore as I am older and wiser, a few years ago I lost my cool with a Food Tour Company in Hong Kong who made it clear on their website that they would never hire foreigners as guides because they where not Chinese and could not possibly understand the Hong Kong culture and I took offence at that, for the record it looks like they went out of business.

So here is one of the quotes that the AI Bot came up with!

“While English is widely spoken in Hong Kong, guides fluent only in English may struggle to engage with local vendors, navigate less touristy areas, or explain Cantonese-specific cultural nuances (e.g., dim sum etiquette or temple rituals). This can limit the depth of authentic experiences, especially in markets or rural areas like Tai O.”

Oh… I have been to Tai O many hundreds of times since I was kid.! and I have never had an issue.

So back to AI - the quote above is from the AI response in a nutshell it has got it totally wrong, I have lived in Hong Kong for 53 years, I have eaten in over 1,300 Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong, I have been to local markets thousands of times and I have made it my life’s work to understand Hong Kong Chinese Culture, what, I have been living under a rock for 53 years?

All of this can be learnt and learnt it I have., If I went to London I would assume that most great tour guides know British Culture, what nationality they are is largely irrelevant but I would as a Brit myself prefer to have a native English speaker as a guide as do many of my guests, it is just how it is.

.. and that leads rather neatly into the other side of the argument.

I have done over 2,340+ private tours of Hong Kong and one of the primary reasons I was chosen is that I am a Brit and a native English speaker, everyone knows Hong Kong’s colonial history and my guests figured I had a good grasp of local Hong Kong Culture.

I did a lot of research ( a year ) prior to my first private tour and I talked to thousands of actual tourists on the streets of Hong Kong. (I also did the traditional Hong Kong coach tours with 3 companies) and guess what, the overwhelming consensus was that they felt that the level of English in Hong Kong was not great and that what their number one thing was, that they wanted a native English speaker as a tour guide, they felt that was more important than booking a local with poor English and guess what AI does not even see this a factor.

My other endearing feature so I have been told is that I am blunt, (courtesy of my Yorkshire DNA) I have learnt many things as a Private Tour Guide, my guests want reality they want to know what Hong Kong is really like, a balanced opinion, which means the good, the bad and the ugly. Hong Kong is not perfect by any stretch but it is my home and my families home - a lot of visitors that come to Hong Kong have a very negative perception of Hong Kong courtesy of the foreign press and it my job to give them something to think about.

Now I have done recently (in the name of research) cheap group tours with organisations that operate on selling tours at the cheapest possible price and I was shocked at the poor quality of the guides, basically they offer up a memorised script with mistakes and do not like one on one conversations with tourists due to the their poor English Language skills., I did not learn anything remotely interesting, being a tour guide is not about reciting facts and figures, it is about story telling.

Now in Hong Kong there is a private organisation called the Hong Kong Private Guides Society which we set up over a decade ago and its members are quite simply the best Tour Companies in Hong Kong, period and yes, I am a founder member

We communicate constantly on a daily basis and what a great mix of people and nationalities (some of our group specialise in tours by Native Spanish, French and German speaking guides) but most of our members are Hong Kong Chinese Companies | Guides and the owners are pretty much native English speakers but also speak Cantonese and their guides are pretty darn fluent in English.

If you read my blog you know that I spend a lot of time promoting my friends businesses, we are all great friends and love to help each other.

Which leads to my final point which is

I know my limitations

eh, what?

Yep, I do NOT do Hong Kong food tours in any shape or form, not because I do not know Chinese food, I do and my wife is a great cook, it is simply that I do not speak Cantonese or write in Traditional Chinese (the Hong Kong written language) the food tours my friends do are all based around Hong Kong Chinese Food and a lot of our 17,500 restaurants do NOT have an English menu and the staff speak almost no English, so I am unable to talk with the Manager or Chef of the restaurant about ingredients, preparation and dishes and with no English menus, well that is a problem,

Now technically I could do a 5 star Chinese Restaurant food tour where English is more prevalent but that is not the real Hong Kong food culture which is a lot more fascinating and complex and I simply would be a terrible host

So when it comes to Food Tours, I leave it to my friends who have nailed the art of a great food tour!

So if you want a private tour of Hong Kong with a resident of 53 years who knows the history and the culture then I am your man, if you want a great food tour then contact me and I will send you some suggestions on who to contact

ps read my comment below, the AI Bot needs to learn that one……….

The quality of your Hong Kong Tour | Experience is absolutely dependent on the quality of the guide you choose to book, please choose wisely.

My insider tip

Please note that in general if you book a tour on Viator or Tripadvisor you generally have NO control over what guide will lead your Private Tour of Hong Kong and this is the most important component of the tour. I urge you to check the actual company website and book via their website and do not forget to read Tripadvisor reviews as well.