Difficulties for western students

Cantonese has many, many differences to English. Here is a brief overview of some of the difficulties a student will face and also how the revision sheets try and help.

Pronunciation

As with many languages, the range of sounds used is often outside that of English. In the first sets of revision sheets I have written crude attempts at the phonetic spelling of words. This process is called "romanisation" and doesn't seem to be as standardised in Cantonese as it is in Mandarin (Mandarin students learn pinyin spellings). As a beginner, all you need to know is that each character will have a mono-syllabic sound and you will need to get a Cantonese person to say them aloud in order to learn them properly.

This website uses Jyutping romanisation which has its own help section. You will notice that early revision sheets have two sets of romanisation. This is because Jyutping can be difficult to read at first so I have written some extra guides in brackets which should help western readers. A good example is that some books say that "N" should be pronounced "L", so the Jyutpin romanisation for 你 would be shown as "nei", when the actual sound is like the english "lay".

Later revision sheets and projects such as the Flashcards and Notepads use Jyutping Romanisation exclusively.

For more information, please read the section, Jyutping Romanisation.

Tones
The Chinese language is a tonal one (both Mandarin and Cantonese). This means that each word may be pronounced in as many as six different ways, for example, with a low, high, falling or rising tone. Each tone will make the meaning of your word different and many words have further different meaning depending on the context! To be honest this is my weakest area and I am hopeless at distinguishing between the tones. I am in the process of adding these jyutping tone numbers to all the pages on this site. For details on the numbers themselves please see Tones and Jyutping.

Oral and Written Differences
If you want to learn Cantonese, you face a major difficulty not shared by someone trying to learn Chinese (Mandarin). The Cantonese spoken language consists of a lot of words which are seldom written down outside of magazines or comic books. This means that you effectively have to learn at least two languages, the written form and the vernacular, spoken one. For words and phrases which have notable differences I have tried to show both. This site uses colour coding and icons to differentiate between written and spoken forms - you can see examples here.

Keen students would be advised to learn both forms but if you are in a rush, you should just learn how to write the "correct" written forms and practise the oral forms. I should point out though that I have found it a helpful memory aid to learn how to write the oral characters.

Additional Note: What do Cantonese people do when reading aloud from a book or magazine? This question has provoked some discussion on the Discussion Forums and it would seem that:

When literally reading aloud, it would be acceptable to speak the written forms.

When explaining what is being read, the normal spoken form of the language would naturally be used.

So, although Cantonese people would probably understand somebody speaking the written forms in conversation, it would be considered extremely strange.

By contrast, written and spoken Mandarin are largely the same. Written language may be somewhat more formal depending on the context (the same as in English in fact), but the structure and words will be very similar.

Writing Chinese Characters

This section now has it's own page: How to Write Chinese Characters.

Simplified versus Traditional characters

Finally, just to really make life difficult, Chinese effectively has two different character sets depending on where you learn it. The reason for this is that in the 1950's, the communist chinese government decided to simplify many of the more complex characters, reducing the stroke count and replacing complex radicals with simpler ones. There are various views on whether or not this simplified character set aids the ease of learning and speed of writing of chinese but these are beyond the scope of this essay! Suffice to say, it is generally accepted that it is easier to learn simplified chinese after you learn traditional chinese, as opposed to the other way round.

This website was written in traditional chinese as that is what Cantonese people use. If you want to view the pages in a simplified character set you will probably need some Chinese viewing software such as NJStar. In NJStar you just left click the icon in the system tray and choose "Chinese Big5 Simplified".

The site's character database shows simplified equivalents when one exists. It is also possible to see all characters which have simplified forms on this page.

On a personal note, I prefer the look of the traditional characters and am not convinced I would learn any faster if I used simplified characters.

This is a work in progress, so if you have any suggestions, corrections or advice, please contact me using the contact form or post in the Discussion Forum.