Victoria
What is some good advice you would give to someone learning Cantonese?
Sep 27, 2014 2:32 PM
Answers · 10
10
I suggest that you start with speaking and listening only. This is what Carlos Douh suggests..you can find him on youtube. He's a Canadian but speaks Cantonese very fluently. It's also what I did. In the beginning focus entirely on speaking and listening and memorize a romanization system (I prefer Jyutping but once you know once it's also easy to use Yale) Get a book that has good audio material (I suggest Colloquial Cantonese) and listen over and over to the dialogues until you can understand every word. Try to play the dialogue and mimic the speech at the same time. To build vocabulary I suggest that you use a spaced repetition system like Anki. Just put in the words english meaning and the romanization transliteration. The reason that I suggest that you only start out with speaking and listening is that written Cantonese is quite different in terms of the vocabulary that is used from spoken Cantonese. From my experience it makes sense to learn more colloquial speech patterns first before moving on to written Cantonese. In addition, learning characters is fairly time-consuming so by focusing on listening and speaking only you can make sure that your pronounciation and your tones are decent before diverting your attention to other areas of study. Also, I would recommend that you learn the 214 radicals first. After that I would simply use a textbook and take the characters from the dialogues (Teach Yourself has the dialogues written out in characters for example). anyways, hope this helps..if you have any more questions feel free to ask me!
September 28, 2014
1
I speak Cantonese, I know the Cantonese characters are same with Mandarin, But I don't understand how to learn sounds pin yin of Cantonese, Because they are different: I, ngo, wo is mandarin. So you just learn the sounds or characters? I have wechat and skype, you can add me for help.
September 27, 2014
1
It really depends what your goals are for learning Cantonese. I used KTV (Karaoke songs) to get a "feel" of the pronunciation of some words. But songs are often written in formal cantonese which is different from the spoken cantonese. For spoken cantonese, I used a variety of sources, cantoneseclass101.com was nice, they had materials in both canto pinyin and characters. On my "pleco" dictionary app, I also downloaded the cantonese voice for characters. Nowadays I'm working through movies, where I pester my cantonese speaking friends by sending them audio files of sentences I don't understand through qq or wechat and asking them "what just happened?"
October 20, 2014
I speak Cantonese as my mother tongue but I never know the pinyin for Cantonese. Sorry~ But if you want someone to talk with just to improve the pronunciation, I can help you.
March 23, 2015
My mother language is Cantonese. You can chat with me in Cantonese.
September 29, 2014
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