Please use this thread to briefly introduce yourselves. Some ideas may be
your location and perks associated (e.g., San Fran with large Canto-speaking Chinatown, some county in Ireland where mailing addresses just need to be “Tall Tivadar”),
your language background (e.g., Teacher speaking Cantonese but not read/write; Learner that already speaks Mandarin etc, you’re a linguist that loves your syntax trees)
what you wish to be able to do when you can speak at beginner-intermediate level
other things you’d like to share
How this is a public forum, you’re welcome to adopt masked identities.
Hello, my name is Robert I live in London with Charlie.
I have learned French last few years so I know what “methods” of learning work for me. However due to how different Cantonese will be I am open to new approaches!
I would like to speak some basic things with a good accent, understand “what I need to learn” to get to B2, and it would be nice to understand a VERY simple story (e.g. for children)
Welcome welcome. I think you’d find Cantonese, at least up to oral-A2 level (be able to have simple conversations with a considerate partner), easier than you may expect. Cantonese needs no Bescherelle. Much of the alleged difficulty comes from a lack of tooling and content, esp wrt approachable, standardized phonetics. The community have solved these in the last fifteen years.
In terms of “understand what you need to learn to get to B2“, my goal for y’all is to give you
great familiarity with what is used in 80% of daily conversation
touch every aspect of the language
awareness of where to find resources, and how to use them
The hope is that you get to a point where you hear an utterance, and know that they’re saying “I don’t think that they have __lei5_soeng2_(noun)_” You know you have a Noun hole, you can the phonetic skill to note down the shape of hole, and be able to query it against char/word dictionaries and sentence banks. That gives you a basis to improve with the help of your partner (or a teacher) over years (language learning just takes time).
Hi! Ngo5 giu3 Dylan! I’m the Cantonese Learner and my partner (Karen, the Teacher) and I live in Melbourne, Australia.
Karen was born in Australia but both her parents are both are originally from Guangzhou, so Cantonese is the language of the household.
I’ve previously learnt Spanish for many years, and in the short period I’ve dabbled in Cantonese, have found that progress has been comparatively slow. I put a lot of this down to feeling distrusting of the accuracy of any new vocabulary/phrases/sentences I come up with/come across unless I’ve “vetted” them with a native speaker (and particularly if I’ve had help from an LLM - very unreliable!) When learning Spanish, I had great faith in sources like “SpanishDict” or “WordReference” to look up, confirm, and see new vocabulary in context, which gave me the the confidence to try it out in the real world.
My wish would be to be able to follow along with conversions at the Guo family dinner table, and be able to contribute to meaningfully passing on Cantonese proficiency to our future children
LLMs are indeed hit-and-miss with Cantonese. Written Cantonese is a fairly new phenomena, and that results in the comparatively smaller corpus size and non-standard orthography. There’s also a fluid and blurry boundary between everything written with the Chinese script, and non-Cantonese tech people often are just not clear what LLMs ought to be trained on.
Words dictionary, though, are pretty mature: words.hk 粵典 has comprehensive coverage with sample sentences.
Hello, Sorry for the late start. I am Julian, partner and tutee of Cherie (HK native). We just finished going through lesson 1 and despite some initial disagreements on music theory, found it very intuitive, after previously giving up on the normal numbers only tone notation.
I have basically 0 cantonese skills outside of mahjong and party tricks at the dinner table, so I think I am looking to gain a better understanding into, (other than unlocking the other half of Cherie):
There is a lot to talk about for tone-melody correspondence, and they didn’t make it (yet) into the write-up. In brief, this
1 - la / A
2 - so-la / G-A
3 - fa / F
4 - do / C
5 - mi-fa / E-F
6 - re / D
Is part of the Cantonese lyrics writing “0243” methodology. There are other complexities involved e.g., re-basing, but you do end up with very clean, broadcast story-telling like articulation. I conjecture it’s easier to get sloppy from clean than the other way round. (In normal speech, the “base tone” tends to slip lower over a sentence — get Cherie to read that 今朝家姐開開心心返工 normally for contrast)
There’s a range of in-progress work we’re doing on Cantopop (me, and supporting others). There is a YouTube channel that is providing the tone-mark Jyutping-enabled (soon, with translation) lyrics and Karaoke versions: https://www.youtube.com/@hkcantonesesong_pop There is a popular channel that is exploring burnt-in captions too, and I’ve something pretty interesting going too too (see the Misc → Sandbox in the Library)
