Cantonese News with Subtitles and Transcripts

[wushucrab20]

Hello Everyone,

 

I just wanted to share this because I have been learning Cantonese for a while now and have always had trouble finding a good source to help me move beyond the lower intermediate level especially in terms of listening comprehension. Yesterday I came across two youtube channels that I think will take care of the issue of not having enough content with transcripts no longer a problem and I wanted to share them with anyone else who is trying to improve their Cantonese skills.

 

1. Website (http://www.voacantonese.com) youtube channel VOA美国之音  - The 国际 section has a ton of content updated everyday and almost everything has audio with complete transcripts! I haven't even explored much of the rest of the site, but there seems to be plenty more in terms of videos and audio, I'm just not sure if it all has subtitles or transcripts. There is also a nice live news feed under 直播 that has recent hour long audio news broadcasts saved there as well.

 

2. 香港贸发局 HKTDC - This one does not have as much diverse content as the first channel, but it does have plenty of videos (most 1-3 min) that all have subtitles.

 

If you are working on improving your Cantonese I would highly recommend giving these resources a try.

 

[carlo]

Thanks for posting the links. Unfortunately these are not "real Cantonese transcripts", ie. with actual Cantonese usage and characters. For example, I clicked on a random video on the VOA site and the transcript has 的 instead of 嘅 and 在 instead of 喺.

 

Coming from Mandarin, personally I don't find it hard to follow newscasters -- it's roughly 95% Mandarin words with Cantonese readings. The difficult part for me is parsing colloquial expressions when the Chinese subtitles have nothing to do with the corresponding Canto phrase. For these, you'd want literal Cantonese transcripts. Here's one example:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huTv6V4CpZg

 

Eg. At minute 1:10, with usual Chinese subtitles you'd have “怎麼這麼麻煩，好吧好吧，我來了”。 Unless you already know the actual expression Stephen Chow is using (咁論盡㗎), you'd be hard pressed to figure it out on your own.

 

Alas most natives seem to dislike writing in colloquial Cantonese, and this makes life harder than it should be for the rest of us.

[carlo]

Another useful source of short videos that are still news but with more colloquial language and somewhat more reliable transcriptions is Apple Daily - Next Media. My only complaint is that they (usually) censor profanities with beeps, but the rest is all there. Esp check the local daily news vids.

[Takeshi]

I guess this is a pretty useful resource. The non-Cantonese transcription isn't really a problem here because pretty much all the words are the same, only the grammatical words around the end etc are different.

 

This stuff is so hard for me though. T_T

 

I don't know how to start learning formal language

[Angelina]

Me neither  

[wushucrab20]

@ Carlo:

 

Yea I know its not perfect, but for me I think it will at least help familiarize me with the patterns of how sounds change from mandarin to cantonese, and then the other more colloquial expressions and differences between mandarin and cantonese are things I can learn along the way from other sources. I just think it is nice because the broadcasts are spoken clearly, not too slow and fairly long too. But the Apple Daily looks like another great resource I didn't know about before so thanks for sharing!