Takuya
Useful cantonese textbook Hi, everyone! I just decided to study Cantonese, but I could not find textbooks in my living area. I am wondering if there are any useful Cantonese textbooks for a novice? Thanks, Takuya
Nov 14, 2015 1:12 AM
Answers · 7
2
Greenwood Press has the best textbooks for Cantonese learners available, and have different textbooks for different levels. From what I can see, they also have books for native Japanese speakers, beginning through advanced levels. Though your English is fantastic enough that it seems you could learn with the English language textbooks just fine. The one thing is that you have to use Internet Explorer to order from their website. Also, Pimsleur is not a textbook, but is a really good resource for getting used to the tones.
November 14, 2015
1
小仙X I have to completely disagree with you. Yes, many native Cantonese speakers don't know there is Cantonese writing, but also many speakers do know Cantonese writing exists and use it. Lazy people borrow words from Mandarin but there exists a system of writing for Cantonese which is getting more and more popular (using google input tool, yes). For us learning, it's good to be able to follow sentence structures that can be written down. Of course afterwards, you do need to work on speaking more and listening more.
November 30, 2015
Hey Takuya, good to see you've started learning Cantonese! Welcome aboard! I've heard good things about both the Complete Cantonese and the Colloquial Cantonese books. The audio for all of the Colloquial courses is now completely free to download, so if you want, you can have a listen first before you buy the book: http://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/colloquial/cantonese.php Just don't get carried away downloading courses for languages you're never going to have time to learn, like I did ;) I think the best approach is to use a number of different resources, as no book can teach you everything and the repetition can be good practice. I'm currently trying out the Glossika course and although some people don't like it, it's working quite well for me. With Glossika, it's also possible to learn from Japanese, which might be a plus for you? The Complete Cantonese course has all dialogues and vocabulary in Chinese characters, romanisation and English, whereas the Colloquial Cantonese course only has romanisation and English. I don't know how much you know about Cantonese already but I should point out that whilst 小仙X is 'officially' correct, it is actually perfectly possible to write in Cantonese using Chinese characters and people regularly do. If you want to type in Cantonese, I recommend getting the Google Chrome add on 'Input Tools' and activating the '廣東話' option, it's really an excellent tool and so useful when chatting to people online. For an online dictionary, I recommend CantoDict at www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk. It has both Mandarin and Cantonese, so make sure you don't get mixed up! 加油!
November 18, 2015
小仙X san, thank you for your comment. Actually, the reason why I decide to learn Cantonese is that way of speaking Cantonese is like a song and it is fun for me. Also, I am a big supporter of Bruce Lee and Hong Kong kung fu movies. Quote from Bruce Lee ; "Don't think. Feel!" will suit to studying Cantonese : )
November 14, 2015
Hello, I am a Cantonese. Actually, Cantonese do not have its own letter or character, when we use cantonese to chat on WeChat, we just borrow the characters from Mandrain. So, if you want to learn Cantonese, you can just listen and watch Cantonese movie, TV drama, etc,, the so-called textbook doesn't help at all, It is nonsense for us. if you know some Mandrain that will be very helpful. But, of cause, you don't need to learn Mandrain first before you learn Cantonese. Cantonese is just like a song, you need to learn its tone, pronunciation.
November 14, 2015
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