How Should I Learn Cantonese?

[lingo-ling]

My problem with Jyutping is the use of J instead of Y. Very uncharacteristic of romanizations of Asian languages.

[skylee]

I agree. But it is very easy to adapt to (although honestly I keep forgetting about it ).

[raydpratt]

Long ago, I started studying Esperanto, and then life took me in different directions, but I recently downloaded a free Kurso de Esperanto 4.0 program for infrequent study, and it has been difficult to get used to writing J instead of Y for the sound in the English word "yes" which is spelled "jes" in Esperanto.

I am not sure how many nations with latin scripts use J for the Y sound, but German is the most obvious that I can think of. Esperanto has a strong latin flavor in the roots of its words (my education in Spanish makes the meaning of many Esperanto words obvious), but the history of Esperanto is that it was constructed to be widely readable and learnable by speakers from many different languages. The J for Y convention may be more common than I realize.

It would be interesting if Jyutping was constructed from similar considerations.

At the time that I first started studying Esperanto, I had read that there are over two million speakers of Esperanto in China, and I had hoped to leapfrog from Esperanto to Chinese, but I'm presently satisfied with the abundance of materials available to go from English to Chinese.

The spelling of Jyutping itself includes a Y right after a J, and I am curious: is that Y pronounced like the " i " in machine? I probably shouldn't ask if I'm not studying Cantonese, but I'm curious.

[Michaelyus]

In Jyutping, "yu" is always a unit, representing the phoneme /y/. And in Cantonese, this phoneme is (pretty much) never a glide. So the "y" has no real phonemic value on its own.

"J" for an IPA /j/ is almost certain more common among the languages of the Roman-writing world than "Y" for the same sound. Wikipedia has a fairly good overview: in Germanic, we have German, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian; in all of the Baltic languages (Latvian and Lithuanian being the major surviving ones); Albanian; all the Roman-script Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin); all the Roman-script Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Võro, Karelian, Hungarian, almost all the Sami orthographies); many of the Italian dialects as well as having a marginal status in standard Italian.

But I think the LSHK (ultimately following the IPA) chose "j" for /j/ to keep it clear of /y/. There is however only one set of finals where this would be minimal, that of "-un" and "-yun", e.g. gun1 官 and gyun1 娟, and even then /j/ is excluded before the first (although /j/ does take /u/ or rather /ʊ/ as well as /y/ in other cases, notably in /jʊk/, but that does not give rise to minimal pairs). Other romanisations have done fine without using "j" for /j/.

But then, it is a remarkably elegant solution. Now, if they had made /y/ = "y" rather than "yu", we'd have an even simpler system for "jyt6ping3" and something that looks a lot more like Finnish with extra consonants...

[raydpratt]

Wow! Thank you. They probably chose "yu" over "y" to get separation between consonants with a vowel so that people would not have to guess, but you certainly answered the question of whether Y or J is more commonly used in latin scripts for the Y sound in English word "yes." English, as always, is the oddball.

[JustinJJ]

Does anyone know of any large audio phrase books for Cantonese, for complete beginners (can read with mandarin pronounciation but unfamiliar with cantonese pronounciation)?

An online resource, similar to chinesepod's dialogues with a transcript would be useful.