Deena
Please can you help me to learn Cantonese.

In return I will help you with your English. My partner speaks Cantonese and his family cannot speak English. I cannot understand them and I am desperate to learn. He says he will teach me but just speaks to me in English. Please help me so that I can comminicate with everyone. I will deeply appriciate it. Let me know how you would like to talk with me and I will give you my email, whatsapp, skype or wechat or all. Thank you! 

May 2, 2015 2:49 AM
Comments · 10
4

Hey! I can't help teach you Cantonese, because I'm in the same position you are (learning Cantonese because that's what the boyfriend's family speaks), but I can give you some tips so that you can make this process easier!

 

You've found a great resource with italki! I tried learning Cantonese before I found this site, and I made pretty much no progress. Find yourself a good and cheap teacher on here to help you learn, and then try to schedule as many lessons as you can at first. When you're building a foundation, it's good to have a lot of lessons so that you can get the basics down and forget less between each session. I would personally suggest finding a tutor on italki, and then you might also want to use a language partner to practice what you've learned. After you have a lesson, I suggest entering everything you've learned into Anki, which is a great flashcard website. You remember so much more when you use it!

 

Cantoneseclass101.com is also a great resource. It's cheap, and it's a good way for you to pick up more vocabulary. They do a good job explaining the basic structures that you'll encounter when starting out with Cantonese. They have also a section for learning characters. Personally, I would not start learning characters until you can get the gist of the conversations you're hearing. After that, if you want to, you can start to learn them. I'd suggest using Skritter for this.

 

If you ever want to buy any books for Cantonese, Greenwood Press is great. Also, if you can get a copy of Pimsleur's Cantonese program for cheap or free, it's really good. It's all audio, so it really helps you get used to tones.

 

If you want any suggestions as to which teachers to try out on italki, or questions about learning Cantonese, feel free to friend me and send me a message. I'll be happy to help! Believe me, Cantonese is intimidating at first, but you can definitely do it!

May 9, 2015
1

Native Cantonese speaker too. I can't say i can teach you because i dont' know how. :( Because Cantonese is a dialect, most of us don't know its phonetic system. I dont know how to teach you the basic but i certainly can chat with you if you like :)

May 16, 2015
1

Good advice by Corinne. In fact, your partner is the language partner but since he speaks English, he lapses into convenience. Learning Cantonese can be rather frustrating for anyone not exposed to it before but don't let it get to you. In addition to the above, I suggest recording simple sentences from a native speaker and listening to them again and again. Try repeating and repeating and testing them out on a somebody else. It can be done.

May 11, 2015

Good luck Dena, have been in exactly your shoes and if you keep at it every day and insist on speaking a little with your bf every day, putting new phrases in to practice as you learn them, you will get there. If his family are willing to speak it with you at family gatherings it will help a lot. Be warned, Cantonese is a fun language and easy to mispronounce/'say some words that sound like other words' so be ready for your attempts to raise a lot of laughs but you can be sure that as time goes on you speaking Cantonese will become something the whole family takes a lot of pride in even if mispronunciations raise a giggle.

I would echo Corrine's recommendations of first Pimseleur and then Cantonese101 which is an excellent resource. Corrine, could I add you and ask which Cantonese teachers on italki you recommend?

July 14, 2015

I am a native of Guangdong.I think I can help you. You can send me a message.But my English is very poor so that i am afraid of I cannot teach you well.Because I can't express exactly what I mean.

May 16, 2015
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