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March 28, 2024, 09:34:11 pm

Author Topic: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话  (Read 3578 times)

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vox nihili

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VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« on: January 02, 2019, 11:11:53 pm »
+19
Hey all! 大家好!

Decided to start a new thread here to chronicle my adventures with Cantonese and keep myself a bit more accountable.

How I'm learning

My major resource is Complete Cantonese. I used the Serbian version of the book to learn Serbian about 8 years ago now and found that quite helpful, so have decided to use this again. I like the approach they take; for instance, they stop translating the dialogues after a few units, forcing you to go through the process of translating them yourself. As the language is becoming more complex, I'm seeing how the book puts things together a hell of a lot better.

Somewhat disappointingly, the book doesn't encourage you to learn to write. It does include tradition character translations of the dialogues, but the rest of the book is rendered in the Yale system for Cantonese. I was more familiar with 粵拼 initially but have found the Yale system reasonably simple to keep up with.

Beyond the book, I'm trying to find some Cantonese music and have a reasonable library I'm happy with. I also sometimes listen to SBS Cantonese just to get the vibe of the language, something I've found has helped in the past.

To help with writing I've been using Pleco a lot, which is a great app if you speak any Mandarin or indeed Cantonese. I've also been using a stroke order app, which has been helping not so much with stroke order, which I'm ok with already, but to help set out the characters in a more legible, rather than trying to copy new characters from what's been typed. I'm learning to write simplified characters because traditional is fucked.

I've made a book of my own with all of the characters I know, with their Yale, jyutping and, of course, their traditional forms (as the book has traditional characters instead). I've also got papers flying everywhere with stuff I've written out, be they exercises or the dialogues. I've also made a simplified copy of the dialogues, which the Surface Pro I'm using has been really great for because I can just write out the characters rather than trying to faff about with typing Cantonese another way. There is actually a keyboard available for iPhones that allows you to use a modified version of the Yale system to type Cantonese, which is helpful, but it's still not very good.

Where I'm at

I've been going since mid-November, although I took all of December off. So in total I've probably only spent a week on it; however, I'm fairly happy with my progress so far. I'm up to unit 7 of 24. THe end goal is to finish all 24 units by the end of the uni holidays, which are now a bit more normal.

My major concern is writing, which is just not going to stick as quickly as speaking. Some of the more niche vocabulary is hard to stick, as well as some of the grammar, which isn't really well explained in the book. Indeed, I think the book is underexplaining some of the grammar on purpose, to try to get you to figure it out yourself. Cantonese is just so foreign, with the syntax being really whack and hard to piece together. It's another system of logic that probably does just need a bit of repetition to be able to properly tap into.
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lacitam

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #1 on: January 03, 2019, 01:33:13 am »
+1
Ay! Very nice you're learning Cantonese!

Cantonese is such a beautiful language, even though it sounds like everyone is screaming when they speak the language lol

Just a question, are you interested in the Hong Kong side of Cantonese or the Guangzhou side? (There aren't any differences between them, however Hong Kong canto has 'cooler' slangs)

If you want to listen to good canto music, look up these artists
- Pakho Chau
- Beyond
- Eason Chan
These are all famous Hong Kong band/artists. (Message me if you want to know iconic canto songs)

Please PM if you need any help with Cantonese. I was born and raised in Hong Kong and am more than happy to help you get better ;D

And yes, traditional chinese is fucked.
« Last Edit: January 03, 2019, 01:48:38 am by lacitam »

LifeisaConstantStruggle

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #2 on: January 03, 2019, 09:21:46 am »
0
cantonese songs are the most poetic imo, and it's great to see someone learning the language in Australia!
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aspiringantelope

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #3 on: January 03, 2019, 11:03:17 am »
0
lei yi miu hoi yak goh gong dong wah conversation??
(你要不开一个广东话(粤语)conversation)
omg it's so cringey typing in cantonese because there's like no written language for it.

Joseph41

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #4 on: January 03, 2019, 02:30:09 pm »
0
Awesome. vox - really interested in your progress. Please update regularly if you can!

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vox nihili

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #5 on: January 24, 2019, 10:49:29 am »
+15
Hey all! 好耐冇见!

First of all, thanks for all of the lovely replies. Was very chuffed about the interest! And apologies for having taken so long to update this; I was on VCESS the last two weeks so really haven't been doing anything in the way of Cantonese (nor indeed in the way of anything else—super busy!).

Since starting things back up again, I've whipped through chapters eight and nine. Will start chapter ten today. I just need to write the dialogues in simplified and then I should be set.

Challenges

I'm struggling to find the balance between remembering things and keeping motivation up by moving through the book. I'm finding that I'm forgetting a hell of a lot of the vocab and most of the characters too, but that my speech is becoming more confident and my grammar more complex as well. I think a lot of the problem with the vocab is that I'm trying to focus on too many things at once. It's particularly difficult to get your head around all the grammar, at the same time as moving through the vocab and committing that to memory. To try to battle that, I've started making Anki cards of all the vocab in the book. So far I've managed to put everything up to unit 3 in the deck, then gave up because it was super time consuming. I'll start adding the older chapters more gradually now.

Writing Cantonese

Every time I mention that I'm learning Cantonese, I always hear back "it's not a written language" or "there's no way to write it easily on a computer". These statements are both largely untrue.

Cantonese has always been written down; it just doesn't have as standardised writing system as Mandarin. There are a number of complex reasons for this, but the main one is the lack of a concerted effort amongst Cantonese authorities to standardise the language. Most written media consumed by Cantonese speakers is in "modern standard Chinese", which is basically just Mandarin. Cantonese speakers don't have any trouble reading this, as it's reasonably close to more "literary" Cantonese. This is why a lot of Cantonese speakers who grew up here really struggling listening to Cantonese music, because it's probably closer to Mandarin with regards to grammar and even word choice than standard Cantonese (take for example the use of 不 instead of 唔, or 给 instead of 俾).

Over the past fifty years or so, there has been a concerted effort to develop a Cantonese literature. So there is actually plenty out there now that is written down in written Cantonese, conforming to Cantonese grammar and using Cantonese words instead of Mandarin, where there are differences. The challenge with this is that Cantonese isn't quite as standard as Mandarin, so the choice of what words to use is kind of complicated in certain cases. A good example of this "a pen", which in Cantonese is 一支笔; the classifier in this case "支" is sometimes written as 支 and in other cases written as 枝. My book uses the latter, but the keyboard I use prefers the former (making it very hard to write "a pen" consistent with how the book has it written). Examples like this abound, unfortunately, and become all the more complicated when you start to think about Cantonese in simplified, which sometimes involves the rationalisation of characters (i.e. writing two different traditional characters the same way in simplified), and sometimes not doing that at all and keeping the traditional. 哎呀!

Speaking of writing, a lot of people bemoan the difficulty in writing Cantonese on phones or computers. There are some fixes for this! Broadly speaking your options are:

  • Drawing out the characters by hand on a drawing keyboard (good if you can't recognise how to pronounce the character!)
  • Using a stroke order keyboard (popular in Taiwan because they don't learn pinyin)
  • Using Cangjie
  • Remembering the pinyin for Cantonese characters and using that (my friends in HK use this, but this sounds mental to me)
  • Using a third party keyboard

Personally, stroke order and Cangjie are beyond me, so they're out. Drawing out the characters is too time consuming for proper typing, but is super handy when I can't recognise a character and want to know what it is. The pinyin for Cantonese characters method is just mental and requires you to know how to speak Mandarin as well, which I don't. So third party keyboards it is then!

There are a heap of third party keyboards available for iPhones, and I presume there are some that you can install on your computer as well. Most of them are terrible: they're buggy and just not as smooth as you'd need. The one good one I've found is Gboard, which is a third party keyboard made by Google that you can install on your iPhone. It's really good for adding languages that aren't supported on iPhones. It's not quite as good as the native keyboards on iPhone, but it still works reasonably well. You basically use Cantonese "pinyin", following the Yale system (with minor Google tweaks for god knows what reason) and type away. The predictive text is pretty stupid at times, which is a bit frustrating (in Chinese you really need to rely on predictive text to type quickly, because of the bevy of characters available). Another frustrating thing about the Gboard keyboard is that it predicts characters that sound like the ones you've typed, but are not what you've typed. I'm sure this is great for native speakers, whose knowledge of Cantonese romanisation is very poor at best (therefore it helps them type out what they think they sound like and fixes their errors to a degree), but it's super frustrating for second language speakers who know how to write Cantonese properly.

Music

My most played Cantonese songs over the last couple of weeks have been:

黄色大门 and 唱广东歌

Resources

I recently bought a Cantonese grammar book, creatively titled Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar.

It's designed to be "user friendly", but it's not really. The terminology they use is super complicated at times and the book itself is quite technical; however, this is ok, as they illustrate everything with many examples, most of which are actually very practical uses of the language. The book itself acknowledges in the introduction the authors' frustration that there isn't a proper Cantonese grammar, so they've tried to fill that void. They also discuss how Cantonese grammar is something that isn't really well understood, because of a lack of study in that field, so the book itself gets updated every few years to take stock of new "discoveries" that have been made in that era.

It also has an interesting little bit in the introduction that talks about the difference between "prescriptivism" and "descriptivism". This is basically the divide between thinking that language is rigid and rules of grammar must be applied to it carefully and consistently, or, on the flip side, thinking that language is more fluid and prone to change. The authors themselves are very much on the descriptivist side, believing that their grammar guide should describe the language as it is used, with all of the various permutations of use (without making comment on what is "correct", because that in their mind is a silly concept). They illustrate this really well by drawing on the example of the word 你. Most Cantonese speakers pronounce this as "léih", but it is often written as "néih" and indeed, many believe that this is the "correct" pronunciation and that "léih" is just lazy change. Indeed there has been a general shift in Cantonese, that sees many "n" pronounced with an "l" instead (think 男,呢,耐)but the authors argue that proponents of the "traditional" pronunciation (néih) are fools, because before it was pronounced "néih" it was pronounced "níh", with a shift from "i" to a diphthong, "ei". In this way they argue that languages naturally change, and if we go looking for traditional pronunciations, it will have always been the consequence of a shift from another pronunciation. Eventually you follow that all the way back to the grunts cavemen were famous for.

In any case, I haven't used the grammar very much, but I anticipate that it will help fill in some of the gaps. The book I'm using isn't particularly grammar heavy, and has a habit of introducing grammatical concepts by stealth (particularly tricky ones). There is a tendency, for instance, to add 嘅 onto the end of sentences at times. For example: 我唔中意打波嘅, which means "I don't like playing sport". In Cantonese, you can't just chuck the verb to play sport (打波) after the verb to like (中意) in the way you would in English. As far as I can tell, the 嘅 turns 打波 into a noun (or a gerund, if you like).
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vox nihili

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #6 on: February 05, 2019, 08:05:46 pm »
+5
I've done absolutely nothing for a good week now, but will be getting back into it soon (I hope!). Just wanted to pop in here and say 恭喜发财,新年快乐!
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aspiringantelope

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #7 on: February 05, 2019, 08:46:02 pm »
+1
I've done absolutely nothing for a good week now, but will be getting back into it soon (I hope!). Just wanted to pop in here and say 恭喜发财,新年快乐!
gong hei fut choy!!
gnor hei mong sang da yak ning, lei woi hok dou dor di gong dong wah!!

hopefully you know what i wrote :D

vox nihili

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #8 on: June 18, 2019, 10:58:23 am »
+8
好耐冇写 !

Cracking out the defibrillator and reviving this thread. As I'm sure will surprise none of you, progress with my Cantonese dropped off as things got a bit busier; however, the plan is to get cracking again over the next few weeks as I'll be off to Hong Kong at the end of July! A lot of work between here and then to regain where I was up to and hopefully extend beyond that!
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Joseph41

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #9 on: June 19, 2019, 04:48:47 pm »
+1
好耐冇写 !

Cracking out the defibrillator and reviving this thread. As I'm sure will surprise none of you, progress with my Cantonese dropped off as things got a bit busier; however, the plan is to get cracking again over the next few weeks as I'll be off to Hong Kong at the end of July! A lot of work between here and then to regain where I was up to and hopefully extend beyond that!

Are you still using (or intend to use) Complete Cantonese, mostly?

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vox nihili

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #10 on: June 19, 2019, 10:26:32 pm »
+1
Are you still using (or intend to use) Complete Cantonese, mostly?

Yep! Has been a really useful book. Also hoping to use my Cantonese grammar to extend a bit more too. One of the major frustrations with complete Cantonese is that it doesn't really give you a lot, so by teaching myself a little bit more complicated grammar around the topics I do in complete Cantonese, I'm hoping my speaking will develop a little more quickly.
Have also been practising with the ole GF a bit as well!
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vox nihili

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Re: VN learns Cantonese! VN 学广东话
« Reply #11 on: August 15, 2019, 11:52:30 pm »
+6
好耐冇写 !

Cracking out the defibrillator and reviving this thread. As I'm sure will surprise none of you, progress with my Cantonese dropped off as things got a bit busier; however, the plan is to get cracking again over the next few weeks as I'll be off to Hong Kong at the end of July! A lot of work between here and then to regain where I was up to and hopefully extend beyond that!

I ended up doing a couple of winter subjects, so the progress I'd hoped to make with book study before I headed off to Hong Kong just didn't happen. If anything, I'm actually further behind where I got to and when I do pick things up again will probably need to do a lot of revision.

Despite the fact I haven't done any study for, let's be honest, months now, my Cantonese fared surprisingly well in Hong Kong. A lot of the exposure I've had recently has been outside an academic context, so I haven't been learning anything academically, but have probably refined my listening skills quite a lot. When I got over there, I was genuinely quite shocked by how much I could engage with. In particular, when my friend's parents were firing questions about me, I was able to understand what they were saying most of the time (which freaked them the fuck out when I nodded along because they didn't know I could understand some canto). It was a really odd experience tbh, like having skills that I didn't know I had?

My friend was always with me while I was over there, so I always had a bit of a safety blanket if I needed to talk to people. I managed a few basic interactions with people (buying things, getting chopsticks when they gave me a fucking knife and fork). I also managed to haggle with someone in Canto, which was kind of cool and a little bit of an odd personal goal (I'd wanted to go to 女人街, a market in HK, to haggle but it was closed because of the fkn typhoon).

As an aside, my Cantonese has become a little muddled in the last couple of weeks, as I spent a week in Taiwan after Hong Kong. My Mandarin is pretty bad, and I only managed a few basic things (although could read helpful things at times, such as the whack toilet), but it's meant that I'm mixing characters in Cantonese and Mandarin at times which is super annoying.

Bonus: enjoy a song about learning Cantonese

2013-15: BBiomed (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), UniMelb
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2021-: GDipBiostat, USyd