cantonese
Cantonese
Cantonese
Upcoming:
- If you would like Cantonese courses on Livemocha vote here in their poll.
Essays
- Covers difficulty level, usefulness, no. of speakers, materials etc.
- Article with diagram on the history, dialects, script, grammar and role in society of Cantonese.
Difficulties for Western students
- From Cantonese sheik.
- Comparing which is more difficult and which order is best if you want to learn both.
- Tips on learning Cantonese.
Wikipedia Cantonese, Yue Chinese
- Lots of information on the phonology, writing system, cultural role, dialects and history of Cantonese.
- Gives some information on the characters, romanization and links.
Learning Cantonese from RTHK
- A special radio segment about learning Cantonese, with interviews of Cantonese students.
How Cantonese reduced me to tears by Daisann McLane, 2004
- Article about the perils of tones and the role of Cantonese & Mandarin in Hong Kong.
Courses
- Thorough course with audio and lots of drills. Very effective. Glossary with audio for volume 1 here.
DLI Chinese Cantonese Basic Course (alternative pdf) 1965
- Huge 9 volume audio-lingual course with reading passages, dialogues & cartoon exercises. Uses non-standard romanization & characters. Audio quality varies widely between each audio file.
DLI Chinese-Cantonese Refresher Course (alternative pdf) 1966
- Advanced course based around texts and dialogues, with audio, grammar notes & comprehension questions. Uses non-standard romanization and characters. Audio only starts from unit 48.
- Tone, vocabulary and grammar lessons with audio.
粤语会话三月通 (alternative) Only available in Mandarin
- 26 video lessons with a teacher explaining the language and skits showing the language in context.
- Beginner and intermediate listening exercises.
Cantonese by Ms Cheung BROKEN LINK
- Video based lessons for learning basic Cantonese & pronunciation.
Websites
- Revision sheets, tests, essays, dictionary, links etc. First stop for a Cantonese learner!
- Lots of vocabulary arranged by themes.
広東語ミニレッスン 1-89, 9o+ Only available in Japanese
- Lots of mini lessons teaching useful Cantonese phrases with audio.
- A few basic lessons with audio, articles on learning Cantonese and a chat room for practising Cantonese.
- Videos with translation and transcript for different ability levels.
- Cantonese stories with translation and transcription.
- Words and phrases arranged by theme, quizzes etc.
- Flash based exercises for learning some basic vocabulary.
Linguanaut Cantonese BROKEN LINK
- List of most useful Cantonese phrases with transcription, characters and translation.
Ryan Newson's Cantonese page BROKEN LINK
- Revision sheets made by a Cantonese learner.
Cantonese material reviews Internet Archive version only
- Reviews books and material useful for studying Cantonese.
- Multimedia website for teaching some basic vocabulary.
- Basic expressions in Cantonese with audio, romanization & characters. Some modules specific to the military.
- Teaches useful vocab & phrases with pictures and audio.
- Audio stories in seven Chinese languages, including Cantonese. There are 30 different versions in Cantonese with character and yale transcripts. Useful for listening to authentic speakers.
Cantonese Self-study Materials Only available in Cantonese BROKEN LINK
- 19 lessons on Cantonese pronunciation, jyutping, and reading characters. Only available in Cantonese but easy to understand.
- Accompanies the book 'Colloquial Cantonese' with dialogues, audio, exercises and grammar. Looks useful but romanization method is confusing to those who haven't got the book.
- Lists of vocab & phrases arranged by themes (greetings, feelings, numbers etc), with written & spoken Cantonese.
- Funny video skits putting specific Cantonese language patterns into practice. Nice for reinforcing stuff you've already learnt.
香港広東語オンライン辞書 Only available in Japanese
- Japanese-Cantonese dictionary, travel phrases & weekly phrases.
- A list of 207 basic words in Cantonese, with colloquial Chinese characters and Cantonese pinyin.
Cantonese initials, finals & tones (+Powerpoint pdfs) by 001Asoer
- Videos explaining the sounds and tones of Cantonese in depth, with Jyutping, IPA and Chinese character transcription. Uses linguistic terms and tables to explain differences between the sounds.
- Short quizzes for learning to recognise basic Chinese characters. Card categories available so far include numbers, directions, food and verbs. Free registration required.
- A collection of links of Cantonese learning, Cantonese music, texts, dictionary sites and more.
E-books
Remembering the Hanzi by James W. Heisig
- Heisig's controversial method for learning Chinese characters available as PDF extract of either the traditional or simplified version. Note: This teaches modern written Chinese (i.e. written Mandarin) and includes only the meaning and writing, not the pronunciation.
- Lessons and info on Cantonese (warning: incomplete).
A handbook for teaching Cantonese-speaking children
- Information about Cantonese speakers, the language, teaching Chinese characters etc.
English-Cantonese phrasebook by Cho Van Tran
- Possibly more useful for Cantonese speakers than Cantonese learners as there is no transcription of the characters.
Practical Cantonese for Teachers Level 1 by I. Kwok & R. Sung, 1974
- 15 units teaching language useful in a school, uses handwritten colloquial Cantonese characters.
広東語研修テキスト (Cantonese Language Training Textbook) by M. Nakajima, 1977 (no. A089-92) Note: Only available in Japanese.
- Some complimentary copies are available to individual researchers if you e-mail the university.
Cantonese - a Language or Dialect? by Mau, Wing-yang, Annie, 繆穎欣, 2005
- Thesis can be accessed through e-mail by filling out a form.
A Guide to the Tai-Shan Dialect by A. Y. Hashimoto, 1971
- Academic description of the language, pronunciation, tones & grammar, with sample texts of spoken Tai-Shan.
A Guide to the Teng-Xian Dialect by A. Y. Hashimoto, 1971
- Academic description of the language, pronunciation, tones & grammar, with sample texts of spoken Teng-Xian.
DLI Flash Cards: Common Chinese Cantonese Characters 1965
- Flash cards of 1500 characters, with characters, meaning and compound words. Unfortunately the scan is not very good quality.
DLI Chinese-Cantonese (Toishan) Basic Course (+audio) 1964
- Dialogues, vocabulary and reading material in romanization & characters. Unfortunately no exercises.
Sidney Lau Cantonese textbook audio
- Audio for the renowned Sidney Lau series of textbooks. The series of textbooks, which contain 9 books from elementary to advanced, can be bought here.
Podcasts
- Teaches situational Cantonese through dialogues, which it then breaks down into vocab and grammar points. Beginners to advanced lessons available.
- Informal, progressive lessons between a teacher and a student. Now more than 100 episodes available.
- Basic, intermediate and advanced lessons as well as special podcasts about Cantonese music.
Cantonesepod from Chinesebay Discontinued
- 10 lessons teaching basic grammar, sentence patterns and expressions in Cantonese.
Cantonese pod Discontinued
- A few lessons on Cantonese grammar & vocab.
- A radio series discussing English and Cantonese in Hong Kong.
Forums
- Active forum for discussing anything to do with Cantonese.
Chinese lessons forum BROKEN LINK
- Discussion about Mandarin & Cantonese language and culture.
- Discuss the languages of China.
- Fairly large forums for discussing the Toishan/Taishan/Hoisan language.
- Chinesepod's forum for discussing Cantonese. DEAD LINK
Blogs
- The views and experiences of a foreigner learning Cantonese.
- Observations on the Cantonese language in Hong Kong.
- Blog about living in Guangzhou and learning Cantonese.
- A bilingual blog of Cantonese resources. Lots of useful stuff here, including romanized karaoke videos, dictionary files, pronunciation helpers and more.
Learn Colloquial Cantonese 學習地道廣東話
- Cantonese idioms and proverbs explained, no romanization.
- Adapting AJATT for Cantonese and Saxophone.
Hou hou sihk Discontinued
- Reviews of Cantonese materials and posts about learning Cantonese, Japanese & Korean.
Authentic Material
- Radio, news, TV, podcasts etc. Lots of interesting material.
- Radio, news and podcasts in Cantonese.
- Video news in Cantonese.
- Radio and podcasts on many topics: news, entertainment, culture, youth, sports, science etc.
- New wika with scans of articles written in Cantonese from Hong Kong media.
- Cantonese version of Wikipedia, with over 15,000 articles.
- Comic about life in Hong Kong with English and Cantonese versions of each strip. Note: the Cantonese text is a bit small and hard-to-read.
- Television series in Cantonese talking about the language. Contains many colloquial expressions.
- Radio and podcasts in Cantonese on many topics. Also has Mandarin programmes.
- One of the few novels written in Cantonese.
Technical
- Easy-to-use online searchable dictionary. Uses traditional characters, jyutping and pinyin.
Cantofish, Cantofish with slang dictionary added
- A pop-up Cantonese dictionary add-on for Firefox.
- Pop-up dictionary (with slang extras) add-on for Chrome. Yale romanization version here.
- A syllabary of Cantonese characters with audio and English translations. Searchable by radical, romanization, number of strokes etc.
- Use this to add Yale tone marks to text.
Hong Kong supplementary character set
- Download extra characters specific to Cantonese.
- Cantonese input and character simplification tool.
Guide to Cantonese input methods
- Reviews different ways of typing Cantonese on the computer.
- Guide on character inputting method for native Chinese speakers.
Commercial
Cantonese Course and Dictionary Reviews
- Reviews of Cantonese courses and dictionaries a learner has used while studying Cantonese.
- Many instructional Cantonese books not available elsewhere, with books for intermediate and advanced learners, books on learning Chinese characters (with Cantonese pronunciation), books on vocabulary, readers and more.