Here's a cool Wall Street Journal piece on Jin, and what the Chinese American emcee has been up to these days (hanging out in Hong Kong, finding God, building an acting career, still making cool music... in English and Cantonese): Chinese-American Rapper MC Jin Discovers God, Cantonese.
Known for his clever rhymes and wordplay as an English-language artist, he admits his grasp of Cantonese, at first, was fairly simple. But since making the jump into rapping in Cantonese, his grasp of the everyday, idiomatic aspects of the language has improved, making for some more interesting, sophisticated verses. It's pretty interesting:
"What I have been able to do in the last year or two that I've been here is incorporate more of those idioms, the phrases," says Jin. "The thing is, you have no way of learning these things unless you're living in that environment. You have to be in Hong Kong, day to day, with the local people, talking. You hear it, and you're like hey, that thing you just said, what does that mean?"For the rest of us who have zero grasp of Cantonese, don't worry -- Jin hasn't given up on rapping in English. A few months back, he released a free mixtape of English tracks, Say Something. And he still has quite a lot to say. To keep up with what's going on with Jin and his music, check out his website here.
Jin tossed bits of Cantonese into much of his early work, and his 2007 album "ABC," which stands for American-born Chinese, was almost entirely in Cantonese. But, despite speaking Cantonese at home with family and several trips to Hong Kong as a child, he admits that his use of it in songs was fairly simple. Native speakers often pointed out that his wordplay wasn't as deft in Cantonese as it was in English.
"I would like to think that my English vocabulary is rather extensive, whereas my Cantonese vocabulary is relatively limited," Jin says. "What is in my Cantonese vocabulary is just a lot of day to day, you know, a little bit of mottoes and sayings here and there, but ultimately, there's a long way to go."