Hello Cantonese (Introduction thread)

We spend five minutes each class to recite any one of these:
“詩史試時市事昔錫食”
“因忍印人引孕一吔日”
“分粉訓焚憤份忽發佛”
and this : “三九四零五二七八六”

I treat it more as ear training exercise in music (do-re-mi…), the overall goal is they can tell the difference between “媽媽 (tone 1-1 or 4-1) 嫲嫲 (tone 4-4)” by the end of the year for those who barely speak at home. Of cause we would love them to totally have a good hang on it but the environment doesn’t really permit it. There are 2 main problems:

  1. Even they speak at home, they don’t speak it with peers at their day to day;
  2. There is not much good cultural support for them (TV shows that are not just cartoons that are dubbed, there’s a lack of good kids show in Cantonese). One I can think of is “柏林週記” but that was already 30+ years old and I found the content might not be connected to them. Most of the better TV shows nowadays are all adult themed and not appropriate for kids.

Ouuu. Those are challenging even for native speakers!

I agree that there is a dearth of material; one aside I’m investigating is how to quickly generate attractive animation/comics-with-sound. (Cantonese Font is getting its mascot, which is a Lion Dance lion-cub.) With such a bloc of material, where Yue transcripts + jyutping + En/Fr are available, teachers can use it in class and there will be stuff for general usage. Hey, at least we have now solved the Jyutping problem!

https://cantonese-alliance.github.io/

https://cantonesealliance.org/

you may find these links useful for teaching Cantonese.

Thanks for these. I occasionally go into their Discord to look, and @seraph is one of the volunteer teachers there (who have been very supportive since v1 :man_bowing:).

Hello, All.
I’m Gloria from Guangdong, currently based in Foshan city (not sure if you have heard of it—it’s next to Guangzhou). Previously, I taught Chinese at international schools in Thailand. Now, I work online and am the creator of a YouTube channel called “Dope Chinese with Gloria.

I teach Cantonese and Mandarin online. I’ve been searching for a font like Visual Fonts for years, and I’m glad to have finally found it. It will save me a lot of time.

Thank you, Jon, for creating this platform and providing such an excellent font for us.

Hi Gloria,

Thanks for your interest, and the awesome YouTube videos. The conversational ones are especially excellent.

I think you’ll find that the font does more than saving time! Esp with the Jyutping-toggling, the Only Jyutping variant, and the “translation” feature, you’ll probably find that you can come up with activities previously not accessible. These will probably emerge over time.

At some point after we come back from traveling, we might want to hop on a call to see what you need, and what you want to make, so the Lab Pass expands on what creators need, and the Library Pass content don’t overlap with your offerings.

Jon

Hi Jon,

Thank you for your kind words and support for my YouTube videos. I’m glad you enjoyed the conversational ones!

I’m very happy to have a call with you and the team, but I need some time to get used to this new font. I’ll see if I encounter any issues or find ways to create more efficiently. Let’s schedule a Zoom meeting for next week.

Best regards,
Gloria

2 Likes

Hi Jon, this is Chuck now living in Hong Kong

I was wondering if there was a youtube instructional video to help new users get started

Hi Chuck,

There are several resources to help new users get started:

Documentations at First Steps | Cantonese Fonts is text together with videos:

Editable Starters included in each download serves as both example and walk-through for every feature:

video tutorial with narration (about 30 min) is available in English and in Cantonese.

I think this last resource may be the closest to what you’re looking for.

Jon

Hi everyone,

My name is Cheng. I’m a mandarin speaker, a fresh new Chinese immigrant now living in Ottawa, Canada. (Hi Clara! It’s amazing to see your post and to learn about such a wonderful school here!)

I started to learn Cantonese very recently as I have been passionate about HK films and actors. And I just heard about this wonderful visual-fonts tool on Threads. Although I did see people mentionning it previously, I had thought it was used for adding jyut-ping manually, and I didn’t realise that it’s able to just automatically generate jyut-pings until just now. So I’m really happy to have it being so helpful for me to learn vocabulary in daily reading!

1 Like

Hi Cheng - for Mandarin speakers, you’ll be interested in the 廣播劇 project — that would be the right level for you to read and listen (somewhat entertaining):

The first episode is out tonight (I too am waiting for a link), and with the fonts, you also get the interaction where you can click on particular sentences to scroll to them, listen at half-speed, as well as a French translation so you can learn Cantonese and French at the same time :v: