The obligatory hello world thread.
Who are you and where are you from? ![]()
The obligatory hello world thread.
Who are you and where are you from? ![]()
Iām Jon, maker of the Cantonese Fonts. I am a Hong Konger living in Hong Kong; my wife is Argentine. I spent my formative years in Italy and Canada, mostly Vancouver-Victoria.
My formal training is in chemistry. I was a teacher for a decade. Now I split my time between Cantonese projects and Argentine Tango: concurrent with the Visual Fonts, Eli and I also started a studio in Causeway Bay.
Iām an unlikely champion for Cantonese technology. My Chinese had laid dormant since mid-teens; my Canto linguistics and programming were both self-taught and acquired-when-needed.
Hi, I am Poohsticks.
I am French living in Hong Kong.
I have been struggling improving my basic Cantonese.
Welcome poohsticks. I personally think that French is much more intrinsically difficult as a language. Canto should be not-so-hard if we can the right materials be available ![]()
Hi! Iām Albert. Born, raised, live in Seattle to HK immigrants. Grew up on a constant diet of TVB and éåŗø + 80s/90s Cantopop. Also grew up with Taiwanese learning textbooks and constantly being told that āitās the same as Cantonese, just pronounced differentlyā¦youād understand if you knew the language betterā which severely hampered my ability to learn Chiense for decades. Thus Iām very interested in preserving Cantonese + creating more teaching materials.
Iām a swiss-army-knife dev. Main experience with Cantonese was creating the Google Cantonese Input method a decade ago.
Welcome Albert, and thank you for your advice and support. Having a āGoogle-backedā input method for Cantonese changed what was possible to do by millions of people: marvelous to have yāall OG here!
Hi all, I am Carine from HK, also French, living in France now. I have been teaching Cantonese and Chinese literacy to non native speakers many years and I see that there are not much learning material for intermediate learners, so I am writing some books helping them to learn vocabulary easier. My students are IT guys, professors and mothers.
I am looking for ebook and font layouts for my ebooks and that is why reach this forum. I will be delighted if I can use your fonts to improve my book layout for learners.
Hi Jon, the internet is small, do you remember me>?
my project
https://cantonesehome.com/
book
https://exercises.cantonesehome.com/
Hi Carine⦠What a small world! I bet neither of us thought about meeting here 7ā8 years ago.
eBooks. Of course Iāll be happy to help. It might be a little tricky without āfixingā the content as graphics; let me pass you a copy, and then we should start a different thread to troubleshoot / get to some ābest practiceā.
French. If you are doing Canto teaching professionally, a useful tool that might help you (and @poohsticks?) would be to fill out the Fr ā Zh/Jp ātranslationā feature. The first sticking point is that checking the inflections/conjugations of nouns/adj/verbs is beyond my French Ab Initio ability, but that might be something that you / someone you are connected to can do.
Let me reply to your FB post with my email, and I can pass you the Early Access links from there.
Do not hesitate to let us know more.
what is the Fr ā Zh/Jp ātranslationā feature?
In English, you can wrap some words in {} and it ābecomesā Chinese with Jyutping (Zh/Jp). I obviously donāt know enough French to do that properly, but if there are groups of French speakers that thought itād be useful and would put time to edit some spreadsheets, it should be technically feasible.
Hi! it is Suie from Melbourne~ Thank you Jon to create this wonderful font which save my time and produce more content and story with Jyutping~
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I am preparing my next Cantonese Idiom Story video. Will share with you while it is ready!
but I found the font in Window canāt show in color, but no problem in macbook. is my window desktop too old or some issue in Window? (usually I do the video-editing with my Window desktop)
Welcome Suie. Iād love to see more multimedia materials coming out with Jyutping. Iāve duplicated your next post (re: usage) into the 2.6 discussion thread, so people searching for that can find it directly.
Hello all,
Quebecker here who wishes to learn Cantonese.
One could say that love has brought me in contact with the Chinese and specifically Cantonese world. Travel has familiarized me with the Greater Bay Area and while Iām pretty happy where I live, I will return to the GBA frequently.
I speak or have notions of a few other European languages including English. But this is the biggest challenge yet. Almost like learning 2½ languages ā Cantonese, Chinese characters and some Mandarin because of the structure of most learning resources. I hope to make the job a little easier through the use of this font.
In terms of my computing environment: I will first try to use and test the font under Linux (Gnome desktop environment), dbus-rime input method for jyutping and the Firefox browser.
Welcome AT41. You are the 3rd francophone here ![]()
Linux is at the moment completely untested. I have my reservations; Mac/Inkscape presumably share FreeType under the hood, and it shows the font correct in the character-selection but āshrunkā in general use. You should check that your distro uses at least FreeType 2.12 (from 2023 Apr); that is when color-SVG support was first added.
One set of content that I really want to make is ātwenty 10 min lessons for doing with a Canto-speaking friend/partner/parent,ā which gets people all the skeleton of the main concepts from which the rest is slowly adding quantity. It sounds super-niche but I feel that personal relationships is a significant case for learning Cantonese.
You are the 3rd francophone here
I canāt explain the coincidence but I hear that there are a lot of highly qualified French from France that pass by HK.
One set of content that I really want to make is ātwenty 10 min lessons for doing with a Canto-speaking friend/partner/parent,ā which gets people all the skeleton of the main concepts from which the rest is slowly adding quantity. It sounds super-niche but I feel that personal relationships is a significant case for learning Cantonese.
I missed the beginning of this conversation but if I understand correctly, it relates to French?
Linux is at the moment completely untested.
I have some basic functionality already. It looks like only Chrom(ium) with Stylebot works well with the TTF format, not Firefox with Stylebot.
The colours shouldnāt be a problem since I have Freetpye > 2.12 but I do a lot of my work in a tool that doesnāt support colours anyway (Obsidian). I am only having some problems with bold type but that is likely my fault or the fact that I have only the colour version of Cantonese Font 2.x: Obsidian displays a colour font in black and white and, as a result, the upper part in jyutping just looks like rubbish and is almost undreadable. This may solve itself with the full set of Cantonese Font 2.x.
What I need to work out on my own is how one can configure the desktop environment to use a specific font for text that is in Chinese. Until today, I only had to worry about finding one font that covers everything, which is not quite the case here. New territory for me.
Obsidian: Obsidian does not implement its own font renderer (sensible), and it inherits from the OS. So on Mac/Obsidian it does show colorā¦
But the font choice here is global, and thereās no way of picking CJK specific font. This relates to your other quest about setting a font only for CJK; if you find something, let me / us know.
Firefox: Mozilla and Adobe backed OT-SVG, but Firefox and Adobe apps have the worst support. IDK how. Chromium browsers are the way to go; Iāll add my Stylebot stylings to Carineās thread.
It sounds like the fonts are doing something you want in Linux?
Hello all, my name is Clara. I am currently a volunteer at Capital Chinese School in Ottawa, ON, Canada. Capital Chinese School courses are publicly funded and is currently operate under a local catholic school board. The school has weekly Saturday morning classes during school year, and morning classes in weekday during Summer when school is off. There are 3 Cantonese class for the school, students are range from JK to G8. The students we work are mostly second generation - which they mostly speak English at home. (Including my household - I have 2 kids) There is a good chance I will be teaching in Summer an next school year.
There are many struggles in teaching and learning Cantonese is the tones. I am not too worry about students not able to pronounce, as most, if not all of the pronunciation found in Cantonese is readily found in English/French. However tones is another beast, it is like musical scale - you get it if you listen to them all the time or you just simply donāt. I find the way the fonts designed with visual queue would help, and I will test that with our students.
Hereās my Chinese background - I had done formal education in Hong Kong till F.3, finished Cantonese G11 & OAC-1 (OAC was G13 in Ontario) in Toronto, also was a volunteer writer and editor for an on campus Chinsese magazine when I was studying in University of Waterloo.
Welcome Clara. Let me know how the tone-marks on the font works for your students! I have used them fruitfully, but only with adults, so itāll be interesting to get feedback from your experience.
One thing that came from a recent discussion on Discord, was that itās quite NOT productive to introduce all the tones at once; that just confuses (despite what us teachers believe is good because ācoverageā). I had good results working a beginner lesson entirely with tone-1 (distinct in its high placement), then adding in ę ä½ ä½¢ (unambiguously different). But you probably already came across these teaching!