Enormous changes have happened in Cantonese society in the last fifty years, which has moved from a relatively third world and illiterate society, to a relatively first world and highly literate society. Western-style education has created a shift in the categorization of perceptual categories; while some are enriched, especially in the distal senses, others are suppressed, especially in the proximal senses. As part of the “Language of Perception” project at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, a set of perceptual experiments was conducted by the author on Cantonese. The Cantonese data reveal noticeable differences in the language of perception between older and younger speakers. With colours, older speakers uniformly provided the six basic colour terms of hung4 ‘red’, caang2 ‘orange’, wong4 ‘yellow’, luk6 ‘green’, laam4 ‘blue’ and zi2 ‘purple’, whereas many younger speakers provided two extra basic colour terms: ceng1 ‘light green’ and juk6 ‘peach’. With shapes, younger speakers tended to use terms which explicitly express the 3D-ness of 3D shapes (e.g. kau4tai2 ‘sphere’), whereas older speakers tend to use terms which do not explicitly distinguish the 2D-ness versus 3D-ness of the shapes (e.g. jyun4jing4 ‘round shape’/ ‘circle’ for a sphere). On the other hand, older speakers outperform younger speakers with gustation terms (e.g. distinguishing the umami taste), and olfaction terms (e.g. younger speakers tend to be less certain about the meanings of the numerous bad-smell terms in Cantonese). The difference between generations of speakers within a community shed light on the resilience of perceptual categories over time.