I want to learn to speak, read, write cantonese. Are there any cd, book courses, tapes that will provide all this? thanks
wanting to learn cantonese
- Thread starter newtohobby
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想學廣東話 ?
Learning to speak Cantonese isn't that difficult ; having said that , the reading and writing parts are a totally different pool of worms .
This is a great , free site for newbies, covers lots of useful basics:
http://www.cantonese.ca/
Then, getting a HK born/Cantonese speaking GF would always be your best bet
Learning to speak Cantonese isn't that difficult ; having said that , the reading and writing parts are a totally different pool of worms .
This is a great , free site for newbies, covers lots of useful basics:
http://www.cantonese.ca/
Then, getting a HK born/Cantonese speaking GF would always be your best bet
Umm...for a native English speaker Cantonese is very difficult. Just by altering your tone you can make one word have three different meanings.
Attempting to speak Cantonese locally will only bring scowls of contempt from native Cantonese speakers anyhow. But if you are traveling to HK or are trying to communicate with a specific person then you might want to give it a go.
Attempting to speak Cantonese locally will only bring scowls of contempt from native Cantonese speakers anyhow. But if you are traveling to HK or are trying to communicate with a specific person then you might want to give it a go.
I am a native English speaker and I learned to speak Mandarin. It's easier than Cantonese because it has 4 tones whereas Cantonese has more. However, some of the same challenges, so I will tell you what to do...
1) U of T has some evening courses that are pretty good. Take one.
2) Go find the Pimsleur Cantonese audio courses, they are expensive ($200+) but much better than the cheap $20 ones. You might be able to d/l a torrent off the net. Get a good high quality copy because if you get shitty audio you won't be able to discern the tones in the tape.
3) Once you have some of the basics down, get a Cantonese talking pillow, preferably a hot one, and talk to her in Cantonese. Practice makes perfect.
4) Once you can hold a conversation in Cantonese, even a basic one, go to Hong Kong and immerse yourself.
ps -- Cantonese does not have a writing system per se in that written Cantonese is really written Mandarin which is close but not quite the same. So you have a big decision to make about whethe ryou want to read to learn Chinese writing/reading. If you do expect to have to memorize something on the order of 2000 characters just to be minimally literate, and 5000-10000 if you want to become literate. The good news is though that you can learn maybe 200-500 characters that will help you read menus in restaurants, and street signs. However learning the full language is a real challenge.
1) U of T has some evening courses that are pretty good. Take one.
2) Go find the Pimsleur Cantonese audio courses, they are expensive ($200+) but much better than the cheap $20 ones. You might be able to d/l a torrent off the net. Get a good high quality copy because if you get shitty audio you won't be able to discern the tones in the tape.
3) Once you have some of the basics down, get a Cantonese talking pillow, preferably a hot one, and talk to her in Cantonese. Practice makes perfect.
4) Once you can hold a conversation in Cantonese, even a basic one, go to Hong Kong and immerse yourself.
ps -- Cantonese does not have a writing system per se in that written Cantonese is really written Mandarin which is close but not quite the same. So you have a big decision to make about whethe ryou want to read to learn Chinese writing/reading. If you do expect to have to memorize something on the order of 2000 characters just to be minimally literate, and 5000-10000 if you want to become literate. The good news is though that you can learn maybe 200-500 characters that will help you read menus in restaurants, and street signs. However learning the full language is a real challenge.
http://www.rosettastone.com/en/?a=b
One of the best learning software material out there ...highly rated.
Too bad that Cantonese isn't on the list ... Sorry.
VBB
One of the best learning software material out there ...highly rated.
Too bad that Cantonese isn't on the list ... Sorry.
VBB
newtohobby said:
There are a lot of books available, but having learned Mandarin I wouldn't be able to recommend a good one for Cantonese. What I would suggest is you enroll in one of the U of T continuing ed courses:
http://learn.utoronto.ca/PageFactory.aspx?PageID=614
They have courses that teach reading/writing as well, or if you just take one of the spoken courses you could ask the instructor for a recommendation.
I'd also advise you to buy a pack of flashcards. I bought simplified chinese flashcards so they wouldn't work for you, you want the traditional characters, which is what cantonese speakers (and taiwanese mandarin speakers) use.
I took the U of T mandarin course and it was very worthwhile. Without a comprehensive introduction to the grammar and someone to ask questions to it's very, very hard just to learn from a book.
Once you've taken one or two of those courses to give you the foundation you can probably work from audio tapes, practice on your own, watch movies, etc., to get to fluency yourself, but I think you need to start out with a good foundation.
Also I do highly recommend the Pimsleur program. It does not teach reading/writing but it is by far the best audio program for self-study.
The rosetta stone thing suggested above, if it has a cantonese version, is good for expanding your vocabulary, but not for getting grammar down. It's very useful though once you have the foundation as a way of learning a lot of words .
But really, start with a night course and get a good foundation.
Berlin said:
Absolutely. Nothing matters more. If you don't find ways to speak and listen in Cantonese you will not make progress beyond the very basics, no matter what else you do.
I just wanted to add this is what I think you are in for, so you know:
-- The language is NOT HARD from a grammar point of view, it is simple and easy
-- It will be VERY HARD to get the pronunciation right because not only are the sounds different, but the tones will be very hard for you initially
-- The reading/writing is not that hard but it is very time consuming. It will take you years and years of steady progress to learn enough characters. You just have to keep at it.
Initially absolutely focus on your pronunciation and the tones. Once you get past that it's a lot easier. That was my experience with Mandarin and I assume it's even more true of Cantonese because of the extra tones.
Agree. Grammar is no where as complicated as French, English. Verbs stay the same through out the tenses, you only need to add time indicators, or tid bits before or after to make tenses and senses. And there are no genders for nouns.
As for oral, not easy at all to achieve the same fluency as a native Cantonese speaker though, unlike most other languages, but not hard to become competent. Just practice.
To read and write, almost pure memorizing. Once you get the hang of it though, it is simply a game of recognizing the words.
As for oral, not easy at all to achieve the same fluency as a native Cantonese speaker though, unlike most other languages, but not hard to become competent. Just practice.
To read and write, almost pure memorizing. Once you get the hang of it though, it is simply a game of recognizing the words.
Berlin said:
You want a fobby gf!!
She may be "allergic" to supersize sausage. On serious note, it's better to learn Mandarin than Cantonese. Cantonese is not a language. It is a dialact.
Plus most of the mainland Chinese or Taiwanese do not like Cantonese speakers, especially those from HK.
http://www.chinesepod.com/
ChinesePod is a new way to learn Mandarin. Whether you’re going for a jog, preparing for a business trip to China, or just looking for a challenge, everything about ChinesePod is designed to get you communicating in Mandarin – fast.
ChinesePod is a new way to learn Mandarin. Whether you’re going for a jog, preparing for a business trip to China, or just looking for a challenge, everything about ChinesePod is designed to get you communicating in Mandarin – fast.
Fuji, just wanted to clarify. The reading and writing are actually 2 different sytems but from the same roots Traditional characters. China (Manadarin) use the simplified Chinese characters whereas HK (Cantonese) uses the Traditional characters.
fuji said:
Two quibbles...
If you really want to immerse yourself, it migh be better to visit Guangzhou province in China rather than Hong Kong. This is because there is so much English used in Hong Kong that it is very tempting to fall back on English and not really be "immersed". Your money will also go further on the mainland proper than in HK. On the other hand, mainlanders have a slightly different accent than Hong Kongers so it depends what you are learning for.
Second, although formal communications in Cantonese speaking areas do read exactly the same as Mandarin (well, except the script is traditional instead of simplified), if you are using popular culture magazines or newspapers from HK as learning materials you will soon find out that there are a lot of Cantonese specific words and slang which you can't find in a generic Chinese dictionary so you'll have to get someone's help. A lot of these you can recognize by the "mouth" radical (indicating that the word borrows sound but not meaning).
A lot of English speakers seem to find the phonemes in Cantonese harder to learn than Mandarin. I personally think its because Mandarin is close to a subset of the sounds used in English. So at the beginning, when learning Cantonese, a lot of people can't even hear the difference between some words, making it very hard for them to reproduce them. So be prepared to spend a lot of time up front on pronunciation.
I wouldn't freak out about tones though. Although they are important for intelligibility, you can be off and people will still figure out what you mean by context. Also, you already pronounce tones when you speak English, that's why foreign speakers can sound funny even when they get the pure sounds right (eg I knew someone Chinese who pronounced statue like tatoo, and naked like baked). The tones will be second nature to you just as part of how a word or phrase is supposed to sound. Also, tones aren't completely inflexible. They are often adjusted to make phrases or sentences sound better or flow more smoothly. I can't show this through pure text, but if you have access to a Cantonese speaker, get them to pronounce for you the name of Flower Street (fa yuen gai), a fairly well known street in the Mong Kok area of Hong Kong. There is a large difference in the "correct" pronunciation of each word versus what people actually say. Basically, I think tones will come naturally to you, and you will soon have a feeling for what is correct.
ILOVETHIS said:
If you want flash cards, I'm assuming you want them for learning to recognize words?
The easiest way to map Chinese words to an English word on a card is to ask the Taiwan "embassy". Taiwan uses traditional script the same way that HK does, and since they want to promote the ways in which they are different from the PRC, Taiwan often has a lot of language and cultural projects to emphasize the difference. You may even be able to get a set for free.
Also, the web site http://www.zhongwen.com has a list of Chinese words ordered by frequency, which is awesome, but they only give you the Mandarin pronunciation. From their main page, choose "Vocab" from up top, then "Frequency of chinese characters" from the right side. Clicking on a word gives you a dictionary entry on the right hand side.
[Edit: I haven't looked at the zhongwen web site in a while, so I went to refresh my memory... Once you show the dictionary entry on the right side, if you scroll to the bottom, there is a like labeled "Canton" which is a link to a cantonese syllabary at the Chinese University of Hong Kong giving a romanized pronunciation, a sound file of someone saying the word (kind of stretched out for clarity), and a list of words with the same pronunciation.]
If you want Cantonese specific flash cards it might be considerably harder. I'm not sure there is even any consensus on how to represent Cantonese pronunciation in the same way that zhuyin (Taiwan's system using symbols) and hanyupinyin (PRC's system using roman alphabet) does for Mandarin.
newtohobby said:
Hmm, why do you want to learn Cantonese?
Many white people who are "motivated" to learn the "language/dialact" so to speak are the following,
-a necesscity as he or she does not know what the HK Chinese are talking about when they speak with a combination of English and Cantonese. He or she needs to know whether they are really talking him or her behind the back. Knowing the meaning Gwai Lo/Po/Mui/Chai does not help much.
-the white person is a Christian missionary or sons & daughters of missionary and the person is motivated to convert the Chinese to be Christians. Nothing can win the hearts and minds faster than talking like the locals.
-too non-PC to say here....
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