How to learn mandarin from cantonese?

[civic94]

Background on me- American born chinese, can speak 100% cantonese, but cant read or write. Want to go to china as a root seeker in the coming year or a few.

I have been learning mandarin and some of the words from cantonese and mandarin are very similar in sounds but different tones, I have only been able to hold up and understand about 25-30% of a normal conversation. I have found out for me, its hard for me to learn mandarin through English pinyin.

I cant read chinese, but each time I dont understand a mandarin word, I show it to my mom, and she says the word in cantonese, so I can learn this way, much much easier. I have been searching online for many days to find something like a video that says a word in cantonese and then says it in mandarin.

what I mean by similar sounds but different tones, such as "on the road" in cantonese, its "low sewn", in mandarin its "Lu Shang" so its similar, but some words such as "like" in cantonese its "zhong yi" but in mandarin its "xi huan", and thats the tough part to process and piece together for me.

I have learned Cantonese as a kid by watching movies and my mom, but the biggest problem for me is that I dont know how to read, If I did I can just watch mandarin movies and read the words, then piece the words together and see the difference

... why did i not go to chinese school as a kid lol.....

does anyone know of any videos on this? I find this way of learning much easier for me, I learned and remembered 10 words every few days this way, while if I use pinyin, I would learn maybe 1 word in a few days. thank you much !

[yonglin]

If you find learning a word's pronunciation using pinyin to be so painful, I actually wonder whether you have made the effort to learn pinyin properly. By "properly", I mean being able to write down a word effortlessly in pinyin from hearing it, and perfectly inferring the pronunciation from the pinyin. Pinyin has nothing to do with English, by the way. Millions of Chinese kindergartners are fluent in pinyin without knowing a word of English.

Also, I would have thought that reading "lu shang" in pinyin (if you can actually infer its pronunciation) and knowing its meaning in English, it shouldn't be too difficult to think about the Cantonese equivalent, no? I'm *just* starting to learn Korean and so far, I've found that I can more often than not infer the Chinese root of Sino-Korean vocabulary using the Korean pronunciation and English meaning alone. I think the situation is sort of similar.

You may (perhaps?) find it useful to learn that there is quite a systematic (albeit, many-to-many) mapping between Cantonese and Mandarin sounds and tones. At least I found this quite fascinating when I started to learn Mandarin with a little background in Cantonese. There are also online dictionaries which present Mandarin pinyin and Cantonese pronunciation side-by-side (example). In order to read the Cantonese, you'd have to learn the Cantonese romanization system, though.

[skylee]

What yonglin said. And please note that the syntax/grammar and word choice (and sometimes meaning of the same word) are not the same in Cantonese and Mandarin.

As you cannot read Chinese and cannot (yet) speak in Mandarin, it seems to me that it would be more efficient for you to learn the language as a foreigner, ie use what other average Americans use to teach yourself. It is very important to learn Pinyin properly, even for native Cantonese speakers like myself. Your Cantonese background will be helpful but don't rely on it, at least not yet. And learning to read will no doubt be very helpful (for one thing you will not be illiterate if you learn to read) but can wait a bit, I think.

This is a useful resouce that lists the Cantonese pronunciation next to the Mandarin pronunciation of each word, and also the brief English explanation. But to use it you must be able to either type Chinese, or type Pinyin, or type one type of standardised Cantonese Romanisation. For the last part, I suggest LSHK's Jyutping. But as your aim is to learn Mandarin, you should really focus on Pinyin instead.

[creamyhorror]

but some words such as "like" in cantonese its "zhong yi" but in mandarin its "xi huan", and thats the tough part to process and piece together for me.

This will happen a lot, because Cantonese and Mandarin aren't equivalent in word usage. You can't get around it - that's the main part of learning another Chinese language.

I suggest you try to get hold of a book/website that gives simple dialogue in 1) Cantonese in Jyutping, 2) Mandarin in characters & pinyin, and 3) English translation, if such a thing exists. That will give you an accurate mapping between languages and help you realise which Canto expressions cannot simply be transliterated into Mandarin. I have a book that does this (bought it in Shenzhen), but it doesn't have English unfortunately.

Like yonglin and skylee said, learn pinyin from the ground up. Don't simply try to pronounce Canto words in Mandarin until you've seen/heard the word used that way in Mandarin. After you learn pinyin, you can start learning characters and words. You probably want to use a textbook or structured course material for this, and supplement with a flashcard system like Anki to help them stick in your memory. There's a free, fully-narrated multimedia elementary textbook series for heritage speakers of Chinese here: http://www.hwjyw.com/textbook/dzjc/huawen.htm (I believe it's the orange 汉语 one) - give it a try, starting from the lowest level (第1册).

Don't give up; good luck!

[Kobo-Daishi]

If your mother knows Mandarin, you should record her pronouncing words in both Mandarin and Cantonese for you to learn.

Creamyhorror wrote:

This will happen a lot, because Cantonese and Mandarin aren't equivalent in word usage.

Although they might not be equivalent, there will be a great deal of overlap in vocabulary between Cantonese and Mandarin. A great deal!

Library will still be tu shu guan (tou syu gun), college/university will still be da xue (daai hok), zoo will still be dong wu yuan (dung mat yun), physics will still be wu li xue (mat lei hok), school will still be xue xiao (hok haau), etc.

Most scientific terms, or anything formal will most likely be equivalent.

Civic94 wrote:

but some words such as "like" in cantonese its "zhong yi" but in mandarin its "xi huan", and thats the tough part to process and piece together for me.

Well, your mother probably told you that xi huan is pronounced hei (as in chat hei, 7-Up, a popular American soft drink brand or as in gung hei, congratulations) and fun (as in fun ying, welcome) in Cantonese.

The last one hei/fun has that whole h to f thing going on.

As in how stuff pronounced f in Mandarin is h in Minnanese, such as Fujian is Hokkien. Tiger in the Cantonese dialects is Fu to Mandarin Hu. Grocery za huo is jaap fo in Cantonese. F to H.

But shop in Mandarin would most likely be dian vs. pou in Cantonese. So za huo dian vs. jaap fo pou for grocery store. Not that pu isn't used in Mandarin.

You really should learn the characters.

Who knows, your Cantonese might even help you learn Korean if you're ever inclined to take it up.

Hok haau school vs hak kyo. Daai hok college/university vs. dae hak. hok yun academy vs. hak won.

Okay won is more like Mandarin yuan (ywan) but with the initial y deleted so everything pronounced yuan is won in Korean. Like their money the Won.

Yuan, yen in Japanese, won in Korean, dong in Vietnamese. Don't let the d fool you. It's still pronounced like the English Y.

It's all the same. :O

Does anyone notice in Taiwanese Mandarin that they also drop the initial y sound in a lot of stuff?

I've been watching a lot of Taiwanese dramas lately and have noticed they pronounce yin wei, because, as ing wei and ying gai, ought/should, as ing gai. Strange. ;-0

Their Mandarin is so different from mainland Mandarin. Actually, I prefer their Mandarin to the mainland variety. It sounds less harsh to my ears.

Then when they had the matriarch of this family of conglomerate directors, her Mandarin was the same as that of the mainland. It was so different. Like night and day.

Kobo.

[civic94]

thanks kobo-daishi for explaining to this post. The overlap words really helps me since some of the words I can understand in mandarin that is really close to cantonese.

Like I said, the rate of learning for me listening to mandarin and then hearing the word in cantonese is 10X faster than me learning through pinyin. for example, I hearned that taxi is "chuzu che" and it took me days just to memorize, then my mom told me that its "chut jo che" in cantonese, which means "for hire car". had I known that, It would of took me a second to learn it. I pretty much ran laps when I can just walk a foot on that one .

[creamyhorror]

Like I said, the rate of learning for me listening to mandarin and then hearing the word in cantonese is 10X faster than me learning through pinyin. for example, I hearned that taxi is "chuzu che" and it took me days just to memorize, then my mom told me that its "chut jo che" in cantonese, which means "for hire car". had I known that, It would of took me a second to learn it. I pretty much ran laps when I can just walk a foot on that one .

Obviously you should be using equivalents whenever you can. Just make sure that, while you learn using the equivalents, you also learn how to spell the words in pinyin and pronounce them accurately. Go to your mother with your wordlists to get the Cantonese equivalents. Alternatively, use CantoDict ( http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/ ) to search for the Mandarin words and get the Cantonese equivalents. It should be pretty simple for you to learn a whole bunch of words this way.

I occasionally try to learn a bit of Hokkien/Minnan from my grandmother, and it's always much easier once I recognise which characters are also used in Mandarin. However, many basic words are different (e.g. 落 loh instead of 下, 学堂 oh-thng instead of 学校) and so I warned you to look out for the differences, thinking that the same would apply to Cantonese. It's true that, as Kobo-Daishi says, more formal language and technical terms are the same between languages/dialects.

I've been watching a lot of Taiwanese dramas lately and have noticed they pronounce yin wei, because, as ing wei and ying gai, ought/should, as ing gai. Strange. ;-0

Their Mandarin is so different from mainland Mandarin. Actually, I prefer their Mandarin to the mainland variety. It sounds less harsh to my ears.

I'm pretty used to Taiwanese Mandarin and find mainland Mandarin tougher to understand and weird (relative to me). Even the very drawled, informal Taiwanese Mandarin is still relatively understandable. The different choice of words also makes it hard to understand fast mainland speech sometimes.

That said, I'm getting better, the more exposure I get to Mainland speech.

[civic94]

thank you creamy horror for the link!

Man i'm on cruise control on learning mandarin now. All I have to do is get the simple conversation words right and I will be fine. (such as "look" in mandarin is kan, cantonese is "tai"). When I just switched these different but simple words, it really helped tons!

[anonymoose]

Yuan, yen in Japanese, won in Korean, dong in Vietnamese. Don't let the d fool you. It's still pronounced like the English Y.

The đ in Vietnamese đồng is pronounced similar to d in English (see Wikipedia), and it comes from the Chinese word 銅 tóng.

[Sandra123]

The characters are same in both mandarin and cantonese. The problem might incur when you move from the six tones of Cantonese to the four tones of Mandarin. However, here is a site that will help you know the pinyin and jyutping readings of both languages:

It's Cantonese-based, so it works in your advantage

http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/diction…

[Thinkerbelle]

Buy yourself a English-Cantonese dictionary and watch more TVB dramas. That was how my dad learned Cantonese. He was able to converse with the Hong Kongers with so much ease they mistook him for being a native.

[imron]

@Thinkerbelle, the OP can already speak Cantonese. He's interested in learning Mandarin.