Pimsleur Cantonese

[flameproof]

Did anyone here do the Pimsleur Cantonese? I did some of it. But with only 30 lessons it's WAY too little. 90 lessons as with Mandarin would be a good start.

Maybe we should do a wiki style project! Write down a transscript of each Mandarin lesson, and then do a voice recording with some native speakers. So basically do our own Pimsleur.

Those interested in SHnese could do the same too.

[pookie]

That's a great idea if we could find poeople willing to do the transcript - a big project. I found the same with Pimsleurs Korean. Only lessons 1 - 30. I'm on lesson 87 with Mandarin and would love the same detail for the Korean.

I'm being a bit adventurous really. I'm doing Pimsleurs Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese all at the same time. Scientifically speaking this should be detrimental to my learning but so far it's working ok. It's about 3 hours per day if you include the pauses but is an effective way to learn for me. Mandarin is my dominant second language so sometimes I answer Japanese questions in mandarin automatically by accident.

I'm finding Japanese the hardest, Korean the most interesting (maybe because this is newest for me), and Cantonese the least interesting. As I would like to live in all four regions I have all the motivation i need.

Anyone else tried concurrent multiple pimsleur learning?

[skylee]

Commuting for 2 hours twice a day? From where to where?

[flameproof]

Pimsleur Cantonese is junk ->

I think their system is good. You can do it while driving, or whatever. But 30 lessons is not eneugh. 90, as in Mandarin, is a good jumpstart for further studies. I really like that there is no book. The Yale writing is really hard to understand and one is bound to pronounce words wrong.

my releatives who laughed at my ROBOTIC innoations.

People may speak bad English to me, but I never recall laughing at one. I always have respect for people who speak another language. Specially with Chinese, they usually don't have the 'don't care' approach and are very afraid of errors.

BTW, I recall one error in the Pimsleur course. Somewhere when they talked about open/close it said "mun' had no literal meaning, but actually means 'door'.

[skylee]

Wollongong = 臥龍崗, nice name.

[mikeedward]

I really think highly of the Pimsleur courses as an introduction to a language. It is just an introduction though, even if you go through all 90 lessons in the Mandarin course. I don't think anyone has to worry about sounding like a robot afterwards though. If you're studying 10 hours a day, you could do all 90 lessons in about 10 days, allowing an hour per 30 minute lesson. Not bad for 500 words. But I think they recommend 1 lesson per day, which gives you lots of time to use other learning resources such as books, videos, software, etc, while letting the Pimsleur recall method sink in. If you get nothing else out of Pimsleur except solid pronunciation with correct tones, it's still worth it. It isn't really a vocabulary building tool, so hopefully no one gets hung up on how many words they learned. Pimsleur really helps build a solid foundation in your language of study. Increasing your vocabulary can come later after that foundation has been built.

Mike

[gato]

If you're studying 10 hours a day, you could do all 90 lessons in about 10 days, allowing an hour per 30 minute lesson. Not bad for 500 words.

Learning only 500 words in 100 hours of study? That sounds highly inefficient to me, even if you are studying the notoriously difficult Chinese. Can you carry a conversation after learning these 500 words?

[mikeedward]

I'm saying learning 500 words in 10 days isn't bad... especially the first 500 words you learn in a new language. Anyways, I was trying to say Pimsleur isn't for learning vocab, but for building a solid foundation in a language.

[rose~]

I am using Pimsleur at the moment. I find it OK, but I would be happy for it to move a little faster. Also, it makes me chuckle a bit as it is tailored to the American male...

e.g., an actualy sentence was along the lines of:

"You are sitting in a restaurant with a Chinese woman. Ask her if she would like to come to your place."

What is a better alternative to Pimsleur?

[mikeedward]

Wannabeafreak, you mentioned in another thread that you did each Pimsleur lesson 6 times. I totally agree with you that that was a complete waste of time.

[flameproof]

Pimsleur took me 6 months to complete and I still cannot talk to save my life!

I don't really want to argue here, but I'meven not finish with my P. Mandarin and get by pretty OK. I certainly get food and beer. And not only do I get food, I actually get the food that I had in mind (well, mostly).

On a different topic. No matter what course you do, IMHO it helps a lot to have a positive attitude to the course you do. If within a course I would find out that it not for me I would just stop it.

I am lucky to be every week in China and can try words on new victims. For me Pimsleur gives only a very basic structure, the rest depends on me.

[L-F-J]

i enjoyed the pimsleur method for cantonese and mandarin and wish the cantonese had more lessons.

but the one thing i didnt like about the pimsleur cantonese is that they teach you to say "nei hou", "ni dou", "noi", "naam", etc.. while that is said to be "standard" pronunciation, you really hear absolutely no one speaking like that. the N's are always changed to L's, as in "lei hou", "hai li dou", "loi", "laam". there practically is no N innitial in spoken cantonese.

and whats bad is that they never tell you that, which can put you into some silly situations.

[flameproof]

You are right about the "nei/lei" issue. I think the N was used decades ago, and they failed to update their material.

there practically is no N innitial in spoken cantonese.

南 is certainly a N-starter. I would say 我 too (you can argue and say NG is a different sound in itself - and is often omitted completely). Same for 五 and 牛.

寧 (ning) seems also a N-starter... but right, it's not that common.

[L-F-J]

actually i recently spent some weeks in my wife's hometown, foshan. (fatsaan) its near guangzhou. its also the home to many southern styles of gongfu. such as wingchun and hungkyun. its the birthplace of yip man (bruce lee's teacher) and the chinese folk legend wong feihung as well as the lion dance.

i met many people who practiced those southern styles of gongfu from that city and every one of them called the southern styles "laam kyun". 南拳 it was a complete L sound. no one pronounced it with an N.

in fact, my wife is native cantonese/hakka (they speak both around her village). she's also fluent in mandarin and teaches both dialects in american universities, as well as english as a foreign language. she's quite the linguist. and when i told her about pimsleur teaching all these words with N sounds she was surprised and said she never knew that was supposed to be "standard". she's never said them like that and from my experience in the area, i've never heard anyone else use such N initials.

i'm not sure how long ago the decades ago thing was though. she's 33 and has never said nei...

so, i think i'm pretty convinced so far.

and the initial in 我 and 牛 is only spelled with an N in NG. but the sound uses a whole different tongue position. its not an N sound at all. The N sound is produced by placing the tip of the tongue against the gums of the upper front teeth, but the NG sound is produced by placing the back of the tongue against the soft pallate.

and 五 doesnt even use the tongue. even though its romanized as "ng", its just with the lips together saying "mm". think in mandarin, we say "mm" 嗯 but its romanized as "en" or sometimes even "ng". but its just an M sound.

寧 and 鸟 are examples of N initials, but they are also often changed to Ls.

but, i've yet to find an N initial in common cantonese speech that is not changed to an L. and those main ones, in my experience are never pronounced with Ns.

pimsleur messes with you and doesnt even let you know about the L sounds. all of those words they teach in their lessons are pronounced with Ls.

[CheukMo]

May I ask which Pimsleur Cantonese program you all are referring to?

[Quest]

you really hear absolutely no one speaking like that. the N's are always changed to L's, as in "lei hou", "hai li dou", "loi", "laam". there practically is no N innitial in spoken cantonese.

It depends on the speaker. It's not wrong to use either. Some people speak with very nasal "n"s, and that's when it becomes annoying. I use L, my cousin uses a soft N, we never noticed we spoke differently until we tried to enunciate a word some years ago. And I am pretty certain neither of us knew of a supposed standard then. The difference is unnoticeable in everyday interactions.

I have a question though. Do the standards say which words should be L and which should be N?

[CheukMo]

I'm considering buying Pimsleur Cantonese, so what is the concensus? Is it good, okay or bad?

唔該,

卓武

[skylee]

but the one thing i didnt like about the pimsleur cantonese is that they teach you to say "nei hou"' date=' "ni dou", "noi", "naam", etc.. while that is said to be "standard" pronunciation, you really hear absolutely no one speaking like that. the N's are always changed to L's, as in "lei hou", "hai li dou", "loi", "laam". there practically is no N innitial in spoken cantonese.

and whats bad is that they never tell you that, which can put you into some silly situations.[/quote']

I agree with Quest. It depends on the speaker. I don't speak with heavy Ns, but my boss speaks with very noticeable Ns. And definitely there are many who speak like her.

[wannabeafreak]

I'm considering buying Pimsleur Cantonese, so what is the concensus? Is it good, okay or bad?

I wrote a blog post about it last year. Its a definite "bad". Don't expect much.

[CheukMo]

wrote a blog post about it last year. Its a definite "bad". Don't expect much

It's going to be difficult to learn Cantonese then as Pimsleur is one of the most extensive courses there is, unless there are some that I don't know about.