His mother tongue is Cantonese. When he was in the Beijing opera school, his school master forced every students to speak Mandarin. So, Sammo also speaks fluent Mandarin.
Sammo once shared a stupid thing of his. When doing choreography with an English speaking matial artist, he wanted him to do just "a little bit", Sammo kept saying "sukoshi". After some time the martial artist had it enough and asked what Sammo meant by "sukoshi" because he kept saying it. At the end, "you know", after clarification from others, Sammo realized he thought "sukoshi" is English but in fact it is Japanese meaning "a little bit". He worked with quite some Japanese martial artists in his films and he unconsciously learnt the word and naturally used it with all non Chinese speaking people.
