How Should I Learn Cantonese?

[Inoc]

What the topic title says.

My background: I'm actually Cantonese but was raised speaking Mandarin only. On the other hand, growing up I often listened to the elders around me speaking Cantonese with each other, so I do understand some of it. (I can usually follow the gist of long conversations - it's the short phrases that trip me up, since there's no context to draw upon.) I think that early exposure also makes it easier for me to imitate the sounds of Cantonese, although I have never been able to identify/separate the different tones of Cantonese (although I've read that there's not even a consensus regarding the number of tones in Cantonese).

I'm now interested in "returning to my roots" and learning Cantonese. Reading/writing simplified Chinese is not a problem for me.

For what it's worth, I tend to learn best in very "structured" programs - i.e., programs that lay a solid foundation in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and build on top of that piece by piece. I have never liked programs that tell you to "say this, now say that, here's what it all means", and somehow expect you to draw the line from A to Z.

On the other hand, Cantonese doesn't seem to be a language/dialect that translates well from the written word to the spoken word, meaning if you were to read an article word by word in Cantonese, you would sound very stilted (please correct me if I am wrong). That sucks for me, because I'm the type of language learner who absolutely nails the reading/writing portion of a language but is significantly less good at the speaking/listening part of it.

Any suggestions as to how I can make the most of my Mandarin background/Cantonese exposure to facilitate the process of learning Cantonese?

Thanks!

[Takeshi]

Just curious, but are you from Singapore? (I'm trying to think of where else Cantonese people would raise their kids in Mandarin... XD)

Anyways, your background is similar to mine in the sense that we both wanted to start learning Cantonese with some Mandarin knowledge already to help and ability to pronounce Cantonese and understand the gist of long conversations due to having heard Cantonese for so long, though being unable to speak Cantonese. (I'm not Chinese though, and my Mandarin was self-learnt and not native, and actually not that very good, my Cantonese has already become better than it I guess, but mainly because I care much more about learning Cantonese than Mandarin.)

I started learning Cantonese a couple months ago when I came to HK. Once I landed in HK; I had forgot to bring a towel with me and was at a supermarket and couldn't find the towels, and I had a feeling in the back of my head that the word my grandmother used for "towel" was something like mo gan, I had managed to in the end communicate the need for a towel and like this, I had slowly tried to pull the weak passive knowledge of Cantonese out from the back of my head and into my mouth in real life situations when I needed to use Cantonese or was going to die.

However I understand you probably aren't going to go to HK.

The next best thing you can do is watch TVB. This seems to be the official method™ of anyone here in Guangzhou who wants to learn Cantonese. I'm not sure how effective it is for people with fluent Mandarin because you can easily follow the subtitles only and phase out the audio, but if you focus on the audio (you are allowed to use the subtitles to help understand the meaning) then after a while you'll probably be able to understand Cantonese, and once you understand Cantonese, the next step to speaking it is just bravery.

The biggest difficulty for Cantonese learners using the TVB method is that they end up understanding Cantonese almost perfectly but still speak with a horrid or incomprehensible accent, but you shouldn't have this problem because of your Cantonese background and the fact that the phonemes are sort of ingrained in the back of your head.

Don't worry, I had no clue about the tones when I first started learning Cantonese too, but now I understand them much more. (If you ask me "what tone is this word" I'll have no clue, but I'll probably pronounce it in a somewhat comprehensible manner; if you ask me "pronounce this word with this tone" then I'll know what the tone sounds like and pronounce it perfectly though.) The best way to learn the tones, and not only the tones but the pronunciation of the vowels too is to compare the sound to common words you know. You are probably familiar with common in house phrases like "sik fan" or "cung loeng". Look up in a dictionary what the tones of these words are, and then whenever you need to say another word with the same tone or same vowel, then just think in your mind of the word you know and try to pronounce the new word in that way.

I am also the kind of learner who is better at written language than spoken language. I like to know the written Cantonese character for most Cantonese words I know. Chinese people will tell you it's a pointless or low class endeavour to learn them, and it is true it is not necessary, but I find it helps sometimes. Once you get good at Cantonese you should have no problem reading texts in Cantonese though. (I'm still a faster reader if I think in Mandarin though usually >_<) I wouldn't advise it at a beginner level though, because then the written Chinese might slip into your speech too easily.

Once you get a general idea of the sounds of Cantonese, it will be very easy to develop a sort of sound mapping between Cantonese and Mandarin that makes it very to understand new Cantonese words you've never heard before but know them in Mandarin, it also is possible to go the other way and make up a new word in Cantonese on the spot and be right at it, but this is a little more dangerous. In general my rule of thumb for translating Mandarin to Cantonese in my head is that if it is a noun, especially a two syllable noun, it's probably okay to translate it word for word into Cantonese, but otherwise only do it if you heard it being used somewhere sometime. It does not always succeed, but it works most of the time.

[Inoc]

Takeshi, thank you so, so much for all of your advice! Your background sounds very similar to mine, which is highly encouraging. I will definitely try your TVB method.

I find that when I try to speak Cantonese, what I tend to do is first think of what I want to say in Mandarin, and then think of the similar sounds in Cantonese. However, that's obviously not very efficient, not to mention some Mandarin words sound very different from their Cantonese counterparts, and colloquial Cantonese speech structure can differ significantly from Mandarin.

I guess my main issue is that there is a severe dearth of material out there on learning Cantonese (or maybe I'm not looking in the right places), and what little there is usually isn't rigorous enough for me - it's more than good enough for a tourist visiting Hong Kong, but nowhere near sufficient for someone who wants to become fluent in the dialect. And when I ask Cantonese people where I can learn Cantonese, they look at me like I'm crazy and tell me that Cantonese is just "picked up". Well, that's all well and good when you're a kid immersed in that environment, but if you're significantly older, your brain is much more hard-wired against effortless language "picking up". In this case, the fact that Cantonese is very much a "spoken" language, as opposed to one that is equal parts written and spoken, is working against me.

(P.S. I'm actually not Singaporean. Long story short, our family's head had a vision that Mandarin was going to be the language of the future and insisted that I be brought up learning Mandarin. I don't know why I couldn't have been taught both Mandarin and Cantonese though ... So now I'm making up for it. )

[xiaotao]

There's a book called something like Colloquial Putonghua and it's Cantonese Equivalent. I doubt it you can easily find a Cantonese class. What I would do is have your Cantonese relative help you make a tape of Cantonese phrases you want to learn. and watch a bunch of Cantonese movies. There's lots available on youtube.

[anonymoose]

It might be worth considering buying this book: Basic Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook

I have not read this book, but I used one from the same series to learn Mandarin. I suggest this series because they are primarily grammar books that start from an assumed knowledge of nothing, and build up step by step in a systematic fashion. Therefore they seem to conform to your prefered learning style. The only reservation is that, if you already have a grounding in Cantonese, you might find this book too basic, although as fas as I know, there is also an intermediate level book.

[yellowpower]

google "learn cantonese wikipedia", they have some interesting and helpful links to some cantonese learning websites.

Cantonese is mostly a spoken language, while it shares many words/grammar with Mandarin the written aspect of some Cantonese words/word usage is entirely different from Mandarin.

Maybe HK native speakers can share learning resources/materials.

[Takeshi]

Haha, no problem. I can go rambling on about Cantonese for far too long anyways. >_<

I don't know many Cantonese textbooks. The ones I have are Japanese ones (I also speak Japanese), but the most common one here in Guangzhou is the 今日粤语 which seems to be a pretty serious book. I can understand you might not want a Simplified book or Guangzhou book if you prefer a more Hong Kong style of Cantonese though.

Also I forgot to say, but if you care about being able to read Modern Standard Chinese in Cantonese, the fastest way to learn is to look up lyrics to music. There is really little practical reason to care about this though, as if you know Mandarin it's probably more practical to read Mandarin in Mandarin, but it is kinda cool to be able to know how to read it in Canto I guess. I would not recommend doing this until you are fairly proficient in speaking Cantonese already though.

Haha, yea, I understand that your parents prefer Mandarin too I guess. Back when it was time for me to learn Chinese, we had to decide which dialect to learn; even back then I probably would have preferred to learn Cantonese, but I choose Mandarin in the end for some reason, I think because I believed that written Chinese was Mandarin and if I ever wanted to read I'd have to learn Mandarin eventually, and because Cantonese probably would be easier to learn after I had some background in Mandarin so I could use more materials etc. My mom (from Guangzhou: Cantonese/Mandarin/Hakka w/ Simplified) supported my decision. (I did learn it in Traditional though, which my parents thought was unnecessary, but I'm very glad I did this. I think I thought TW and HK were cooler back then or something, I dunno.) Ironically the combination I learnt at first is the exact opposite of the Cantonese + Simplified used here, but whatever. I wish I had started out with Cantonese instead, but oh well, I'm making up for it now.

As for why I have become so interested in Cantonese now, I'm not really so sure why myself. The biggest reason is probably when I went on a trip to HK, I sort of got the HK mentality ingrained in me for a while, so when I came to Guangzhou I liked to speak Cantonese more. Also, I was very surprised to come here and see that none of the other foreign exchange students care about learning Cantonese. I was expecting to come to the city of Canton and I figured that most of the other foreigners here would also be more attached to Cantonese but just learning Mandarin anyways since that's what they teach, but the reality is quite the opposite. There are Cantonese courses offered here, but they are very simple and non-serious, and most of the students are just taking Cantonese as a thing on the side for fun or something and are focusing on Mandarin more. It's to the point that when I try to speak to my classmates in Cantonese, most would reply to me in Mandarin for some reason and we'd have a conversation with each side speaking in a different language until all the staring at me makes me give up and speak Mandarin just like everyone else. In a sense the other foreign students' disinterest in Cantonese has somehow propelled my interest further, yea, it's weird. I sincerely hope that there are other foreigners here who are more interested in learning Cantonese, but I haven't met any of them myself; I guess they don't go to SYSU. Or maybe all the other foreigners who wanted to learn Cantonese were smart enough to go to a different city where Cantonese was actually the main language of communication. (I don't have the money to study in Hong Kong though; I wish I did.)

FAKE EDIT: Yes, I said Hakka somewhere up there. No, I didn't consider learning Hakka first since it has less practical use to me. It is my dream to learn it one day, probably I will only try it after becoming proficient in Mandarin and Cantonese though. Heh, if you think learning Canto is hard well... it's probably 10 times easier than learning Hakka.

[Michaelyus]

For me, Mandarin (with a distinctly southern flavour, although also highly idiosyncratic) has always been the language at home, but Cantonese influence has always been fairly strong (one branch of the family). Am guilty of auto-convert (with a very basic knowledge of historical Chinese phonology), unfortunately. It means I really don't speak it at all, though I have a passably authentic accent.

The Yip & Matthews "Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar" has a new edition out, but its lack of characters I personally find a bit annoying. The Baker & Ho "Teach Yourself Cantonese" course was also re-released. There is a book called "A Short Cut to Cantonese: An Innovative Approach for Speakers of Mandarin" out there. I stick to using CantoDict to look up things, especially when comparing the colloquial and more literary registers.

For me, the vocab differences are the biggest issue, especially listening out for them. The slightly different frequency of the syntactic structures (e.g. 把 vs straight verb vs 將 vs 畀) trips me up all the time though - I don't listen to nearly enough radio!

[skylee]

to read Modern Standard Chinese in Cantonese

Some useful resources -

http://www.edbchinese.hk/lexlist_en/ (with Chi/Eng meanings, audio of Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations, and stroke order)

http://humanum.arts....Lexis/lexi-can/ (with Chi examples and audio of Cantonese pronunciation, bigger database than the link above)

[roddy]

There's also a Pimsleur course for Cantonese, if that's any use.

[Sigma]

There is also a Teach Yourself series one but i think it's better to study Basic Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook at first and then expand your vocabulary with other Cantonese teaching books ("Teach Yourself Cantonese" and "Colloquial Cantonese")

[TTMSoul]

Hey guys! First post here so... be nice?

I'm an American Born Chinese (ABC) and I'm pretty fluent in Mandarin in terms of speaking (not so much in reading/writing). I've been thinking about learning Cantonese for a while but I'm just not sure how to approach it.

So what I'm asking is for tips/resources on learning Cantonese for someone who can speak Mandarin.

[grahamH]

I've been learning Mandarin for several years and have now started learning Cantonese, the books I've started with are the Sidney Lau series (easilly Googleable). I really like the structure of the lessons in these books, slowly increasing vocabulary with lots of drills for youn to practice with. I believe the course was written in the 70s so there isn't any audio, but I think the elementary books will be enough of a grounding to progress to tv, films and people.

[roddy]

Three months later - lets have some follow-up!

[tjlai]

Watch more TVB! If it can help MC Jin I'm sure it'll work for you! No, but seriously, watching TVB really does help with learning to speak Cantonese. I'm a British Born Chinese and a lot of my Cantonese is learned from watching TV. It doesn't help much with being able to read/write it though but it will do you a world of good with the speaking/listening.

[Beardan]

the RTHK podcasts of a norweigan teaching Cantonese are very good. They are free on itunes.

[Northern_Lights]

Not sure if this will be of any help but there is also http://www.cantoneseclass101.com. There is so nice stuff over there and it is where I started learning

[raydpratt]

I am presently studying Mandarin, but I also want to study Cantonese after I am sufficiently strong in Mandarin. I chose to focus almost exclusively on audio lessons when starting my study of Mandarin, for I wanted to avoid the mistake that I made in my earlier study of Spanish. In Spanish, I learned the semblence of how to read and pronounce Spanish letters, words, and sentences, and then I practiced deeply by reading books out loud in Spanish -- thus cementing and deepening my own pronunciation of Spanish rather than first achieving an authentic accent. That allowed me to express my thoughts to Spanish speakers who could figure out what I was saying, but it did not allow my ears to hear and understand the authentic accents and speach of native speakers -- even to this day, years later.

The problem comes in part from the shared latin alphabets between English and Spanish, for I could not help but drift towards an English pronunciation of those letters while reading out loud. I will correct that later in Spanish (and have already done so in part), but I knew that it would be a mistake to start Mandarin without first focussing deeply on achieving a native pronunciation of pinyin, for if I could not pronounce it correctly, then I would not be able to easily hear it correctly. My first audio and pinyin material was Simon & Schuster's Chinese Pronuciation book and CD, My next audio-only material has been Pimsleur's Mandarin Chinese, which I am just over half way through. I am adding some character study sporadically, but only after learning the correct pronunciation and meaning of most of the words. This method has been successful for me, for I am being complimented on my good pronunciation of Mandarin by native speakers.

When I have acheived HSK 1 or 2, I intend to go back to Spanish with pronunciation-specific learning materials that I have acquired for re-learning Spanish correctly. After that, I would like to study Cantonese.

I am the victim of an old challenge by Sifu Cheuk Fung, see http://www.yichuankungfu.com/ , who remarked one day that "Everyone speaks Mandarin, but the real challenge is to speak Cantonese!" I briefly studied under him for a few months over thirty years ago, but I was utterly and forever impressed by his soft-style martial-art abilities, and he is my de facto standard for all things Chinese. So, if he says that I have to learn Cantonese, then I have to learn Cantonese.

In that regard, it is a privilege to live in the United States where Cantonese has been the language of our Chinese-American communities for hundreds of years since the early construction years of the American railroads. True, most people speak Mandarin now -- a real testament to the new economic power of modern China in that Mandarin is now more commonly heard here in the United States than Cantonese -- but our old American Chinese families that speak Cantonese are still here. Even today I ate at a Chinese restaurant where the owner was a speaker of Mandarin from Taiwan, but two of the servers were native speakers of Cantonese.

The ultimate difficulty that I fear in learning Cantonese will be the lack of a standardized latin script that will reliably represent the nuances of sound in Cantonese. No script actually does that for any language, not even for perfect languages like Esperanto, for the symbol is not the thing -- the actual sound. Nonetheless, as I become less afraid of reading and pronouncing pinyin as English, I find pinyin to be a reliable symbology for the sounds of Mandarin, and I even find that pinyin helps me remove doubts about words that I am hearing and how to pronounce them. In Cantonese, I've read that there is no standard, widely accepted latin script for the sounds and that there is even disagreement about whether there are 6 tones or 9. I need to know which is the truth and whether there are enough materials in a reliable latin script to help me learn the correct sounds.

Those problems are for the future, but I am quite sure that my initial focus will be entirely on correct pronunciation and hearing of the sounds. I suggest the same approach for others because of the mistake that I made in Spanish and the success that I am having in Mandarin. You will otherwise risk cementing bad pronunciation and poor hearing for years and will have to unlearn before you can correctly learn -- which is twice the work.

[skylee]

In Cantonese, I've read that there is no standard, widely accepted latin script for the sounds and that there is even disagreement about whether there are 6 tones or 9.

Consider Jyutping. I think it is quite good. I think Cantonese speakers who are willing to learn it can learn it in one day or less. And then they can type based on Jyutping easily.

I think the 6 tones vs 9 tones disagreement is a non-issue (as three of them are entering tones). But then I am not a learner of Cantonese.

[raydpratt]

Thank you. I read through the Jyutping wikipedia page, and I appreciate that more actual sounds are represented in Jyutping than either the Yale Cantonese romanization or the similar Pinyin Cantonese romanization. The Wikipedia page also dispenses with the 6 vs. 9 tones distinction -- as you said. Further, Jyutping is both somewhat modern, since 1993, and yet old enough to have tested disagreements. I especially like that it originated in Hong Kong, not Yale or Beijing. Given the time that Jyutping has been in use, I'm confident that I will be able to find audio materials surrounding it. Again, Thank you.