cantonese textbooks

[hunxueer]

hi all,

i'm beginning to study cantonese (have almost completed the pimsleur cantonese i course) and am an intermediate learner of mandarin.

i was wondering if anybody could recommend some offline resources that you've found effective for self-studying of the language (i live in china but in sichuan, so i haven't come across too many cantonese speakers here).

i really like the pimsleur method as i'm mostly interested in speaking/listening rather than reading/writing, but i find the web sites that have the sound clips of individual words rather unproductive. so i guess what i'm looking for would be a good textbook that has accompanying CDs or tapes.

if anybody knows of any chinese-produced ones (i tried one before, but it was difficult what with it being geared toward native mandarin speakers, and i didn't find its method particularly intriguing), that'd be great; or, if there are any that could be ordered from amazon i'd be able to ask my friend who's going to visit the states for a few weeks to pick them up for me.

thanks!

[wushijiao]

Yesterday I bought "Teach Yourself Cantonese" by Hugh Baker and Pui Kei ho.

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0071418768/ref=s9_asin_title_1/002-1983174-2388828

As you can see, it got pretty good reviews on Amazon. I just started using it, so I can't really give you much of a review. Three good things though:

1) It has two CD's that seem pretty well made

2) It includes characters for all the new words and dialogues, which might help transfer some of your Putonghua ability to Cantonese (I hope).

3) It's cheap compared to Pimsleur, although maybe not as comprehensive.

[gato]

I have these two books below bought on joyo.com. I also have a copy of the Teach Yourself Cantonese that wushijiao mentioned.

The first (实用粤语) offers something that's probably unique among these Cantonese texts. The author reads a number of short essays in Cantonese about Cantonese culture (mainly food, that is, hehe). All the readings come with audios on the CD and exact Cantonese character transcriptions in the book. It'll probably take an advanced learner to understand these clips, but it's good to know that they are available. The book includes the basics, as well, like "how are you" and "where were you born" and such.

Since these two books are written for Chinese, all the explanations are in Chinese.

http://www.joyo.com/detail/product.asp?prodid=bkbk609445&ref=SR&uid=wwsmnxytls7aww5musgs7gagm

实用粤语（附光盘）

作者：宋增民

http://www.joyo.com/detail/product.asp?prodid=bkbk618149&ref=DT_SMV&uid=wwsmnxytls7aww5musgs7gagm

即学即用广州（跟我学讲广州话）（配送MP3光盘）

作者：何嘉贤

[wai ming]

I think "Teach Yourself Cantonese", which wushijiao recommended is pretty good - and I dare say it's much more comprehensive than Pimsleur. I personally haven't used Pimsleur before, but I've heard it doesn't take you very far at all, whereas some of the vocabulary introduced in the latter half of "Teach Yourself Cantonese" is fairly advanced.

Apart from TY, there's also "A Cantonese Book" (Peter CHAN & Betty HUNG, Greenwood Press Hong Kong 1994, 309pp text & 4 audio cassettes, ISBN 9789622791466) is also a good, fairly comprehensive book for beginners.

You might also like to try "A Short Cut to Cantonese" (Yin-Ping Cream LEE,

Greenwood Press Hong Kong 1998, 250pp text & 1 audio cassette, ISBN 9789622791879) which is advertised as being specially designed for English speakers with a Mandarin background. I haven't used it personally, but the author has written other highly recommended Cantonese texts at an intermediate-advanced level.

Both TY and "A Cantonese Book" use Yale romanisation, which you'll find is fairly standard for most Cantonese texts aimed at a Western audience. The one thing about Cantonese materials published in mainland China is that they tend to use Guangdong romanisation (if they use romanisation at all) which to most western learners, is pretty confusing and kind of messy. I would suggest most English speakers would be better off getting a textbook with a standard form of romanisation (eg not older versions of TY) such as Yale, which use 6 tones instead of 9 (which just tends to make things overly confusing). That's not to say that useful material can't be found in other books, but it's good for beginners to get the sound system down sooner rather than later.

[hunxueer]

wow! the only copy of "a shortcut to cantonese" available on amazon is going for US$134.21!!! can't say i'll be making that purchase. guess it's "teach yourself" for me.

how does one make payments for a site such as joyo? do they take only credit cards or will they accept chinese bank cards?

[flameproof]

Oh, Betty Hung. I met her and did some classes with her. I would certainly not buy her books.

RTHK's Everyday Cantonese is not bad, but published in the 70th. I guess they even don't have CDs, just poor quality tapes.

Maybe there are useful links here: http://cantonese.hk/wp/

The Pimsleur course teaches only about 250 words. I suggest the "Kaufmann" method. Find some podcasts with transcripts and listen to them 30 times. I don't think you can learn Canto from a book.

For a low entry, the RTHK radio every Tuesday in Naked Lunch is quite ok. See the link in this area.

[onebir]

Can't do any harm to try FSI Cantonese, since you can download it for free...

[flameproof]

Can't do any harm to try FSI Cantonese,

The sound quality is too bad to be any use. The lessons are also extremely boring. No topic, just drills of words.

[onebir]

Whatever. The OP can download & decide.

[flameproof]

download & decide.

Sure. I suggest to de-noise the MP3s. Some audio software can do it, such as "Cool Edit". I wonder if you can also add brilliance. But the "boring" can not be removed by technology.

(have almost completed the pimsleur cantonese I course

I think there is only I, and no II + III. Means you learn about 250-300 words only. Not much, but Pimsleur is still very good to get the pronunciation.

[rathpy]

Flameproof wrote: [re FSI Cantonese]

>> The sound quality is too bad to be any use.

I'm not a fan of listening to MP3, but I find the recordings fine. I can certainly hear all the pronunciation properly.

>> The lessons are also extremely boring.

>> No topic, just drills of words.

Each lesson has a main dialogue, and that dialogue has a theme, eg. buying something at a store, instructing a driver where to go, etc. That's pretty much a 'topic' to me.

I'm not sure how "just drills of words" could be said.

Most lessons have:

- The dialogue (1. at full speed; 2. each sentence repeated; 3. each phrase said 6 times)

- Pronunciation (discussion in book; practice in audio)

- Explanation of vocabulary, grammar, usage, customs, etc. in book

- Drills

- Conversations for listening

- How do you say it? -type questions.

I think all those components are valuable. But the beauty is, the student can pick and choose which components to use. If you believe you will learn the language by just listening to audio conversations, then this course certainly has 'em. (The downside is you'll have to fish through the single audio file per lesson to locate them).

Personally, I reckon the 'drills' (as terible term as it is) are the best parts of the course. As learners, we often don't have as much access to people to talk with as we'd like. The drills are are limited form of interaction, eg. asking to acually answer questions in real time. They challenge you to speak and not just passively listen all the time.

[Pravit]

I'm interested in learning Cantonese too, and I noticed the entire Routledge Cantonese series available at my university library - what a coup! Unfortunately, they lacked audio. Still, I think it looks like a pretty good book, esp. if you had some way of hearing the language.

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Cantonese-Workbook-Routledge-Grammars/dp/0415193850/sr=8-5/qid=1171339092/ref=pd_bbs_sr_5/102-8063754-9991307?ie=UTF8&s=books

I also think the FSI Cantonese course is very nice considering the price and its online availability. The pace seems very slow, and the lessons are a bit excruciating as you have to hear and repeat everything 3 times - but still, I think it would provide someone a decent conversational base in a language, and hey, what's this I hear about the "chorus method"?;) It's a big find for those of us who used to search all over the internet for language learning resources with actual content, only to find a gaudily-colored Geocities page with blinking marquees and broken links to .au files of a few common phrases.

[roddy]

Few posts deleted, some people might like to check the T&Cs

7) Discussion of cracked / pirated / copied Chinese learning material (particularly software) is not allowed.