About these pages

I started learning Cantonese and the written Chinese language at a very friendly class run by the St. Neots Chinese Society (it has now closed unfortunately).  This class was taught by unpaid volunteers and they did an excellent job.  Thanks in particular go to Mr Lai, Jocelyn, Joyce, Edith, Bernadette and the many other teachers who showed great patience with us beginners!  St. Neots is a market town in Cambridgeshire, England by the way - about an hour from London.  The town website is at www.st-neots.co.uk if you want to know more about it.

At the end of every lesson I would type up what we had learned in M$ Word.  The class interested me enough that I started looking for learning resources on the web but all the ones I found were aimed at students of Mandarin.  So I decided that it would be just as quick for me to write up my notes in webpage format and then I could publish them on the Internet in the hope that they would be useful to other people.  I have tried to keep the format simple so that each page may be printed on a single sheet of paper.

So it is important to realise that these pages are just notes (and notes made by a beginner at that!).  They will be of limited use on their own but will hopefully be a useful supplement to a proper Cantonese course.

Wherever possible, I have tried to show:

• a "westernised" form of pronunciation for absolute beginners (for the absolute beginners section only)
• correct jyutping romanisation/pronunciation of the words including tone numbers.
• Chinese characters for the correct written form
• Cantonese characters for any oral variations

I have also tried hard to ensure that each page of notes will print on a single page of A4.  You should be able to print out all the notes and put them in a folder.  The date at the top of each page will show you when it was last updated.  This is important because from time to time I will add new information to existing sheets or someone may be kind enough to correct a mistake for me.

Since those early days, the site has grown larger than I could ever have hoped. In 2003 I started adding characters to a database, allowing such features as dynamic quizzes and flashcards.  This endeavour soon snowballed into the CantoDict project, allowing volunteers from all over the world to contribute to a completely unique Cantonese and Mandarin dictionary.  

Various Help articles are available for this website.

There is an extensive Collection of Links.

There are also  Frequently Asked Questions, Acknowledgments, Contact Information, Parental Advisory, Programming Notes, Site update history, Privacy Statement and Copyright pages.

If you like this site, there is a whole page on How You Can Help.

This site has significant expenses which I pay myself.  The web server is corporate grade to cope with the 8000+ visitors it receives per day (this figure continually rises, but is correct from June 2006).  The site isn't just a set of static pages,  there are intensive database scripts running  the forums, dynamic Chinese tests, Chinese Dictionary and our chat room.  This technology costs money and for this reason I make no apology for having a Donation Page.  As another way of raising funds, I also sell Deluxe and Magnetic Chinese Flashcards, which I can post to anywhere in the world.

If you would like to "tip" this website you can do so by clicking the PayPal button!

Finally, if you are interested in who I am, you can visit my personal homepage or my Internet company, Celerity Design.

 
We are an affiliate of Amazon so if you like this site and are making a purchase from Amazon anyway you can help us by clicking the logo above.