Cantonese Learning Experiences

"I am married to a native Cantonese speaker plus I have a general interest in languages."

"Advanced? I am approaching the first stage of fluency. (On my scale level 3-4 out of 7.)"

"I can recognise about 800 characters.  I can read texts inside Cantonese textbooks, but nothing else, because I hardly know any Mandarin.  I've never bothered much about learning to write."

"I've spent major efforts on learning English, Italian, French, Russian and Latin and I'm fluent in the first three. No previous experience in any non-European language, but I did attend a Mandarin beginners' class in the meantime."

"A teacher is definitely very helpful, but hard to come by in the places I lived. The minimum requirement is a friendly native speaker at your disposition, but that is not as good as a teacher. (Ever tried to explain your own mother tongue to someone trying to learn it?)
Books with tapes is thus all I had.  Many are helpful. Some are not. The first one I had (old version of Teach Yourself) was so bad that it wasted me two years."

"The real main difficulty for me was that the vocabulary is completely different from European languages and thus difficult for me to memorise. It took me a long time to get to the point where learning a new Cantonese word was about as easy as learning a new English word. I think it is the main reason that I made only slow progress in the beginning. Assuming that Chinese face the same problem when learning a Western language, I find it remarkable that so many Chinese speak fluent English.
Other much less important difficulties were:

1) All those homophones, i.e. different words that are pronounced exactly the same.

2) At the time, I had a lot of difficulty in finding any decent material to use for learning.

3) Some phonetic features were hard to identify when listening. They are of course the tones in general, but even more so the end-consonants -p, -t and -k."

"1) There is a specific difficulty to get any written material to improve Cantonese language skills on the advanced level. There is no specific material of the sort that you can get for other important languages, e.g. no bilingual story books. There is also no unspecific material available as normal newspapers, magazines or books, because they are all written in Standard Chinese and not in Cantonese.

2) No material available in my own mother tongue, so I lose a lot of precision when using dictionaries because of double translation.

3) Tone changes. (Different tones for the same word depending on context.) Also precise identification of tones is still a headache."

"I find the sounds of Cantonese rather easy to pronounce, as opposed to listening. Tones are not difficult to speak correctly, they are just difficult to identify correctly when someone else is speaking them. The only pronunciation difficulty that I found is the correct pronunciation of the end consonants -p, -t and -k, but even this does not lead to misunderstandings. I found English, French, Mandarin and Russian more difficult to pronounce.

Also, grammar is not so difficult. "

"1) Check whether you have a very good reason to learn the language, whether you are really serious about it. If not, do not waste your time on it.

2) Be sure to get a native speaker to help you. If you have access to a class, join it.

3) If that is your first Asian language, be patient and allow yourself some time to get used to the language. It is not the same as learning a language that is closely related to your own mother tongue. Do not expect to be fluent in a year, except if you are a language genius or you are doing an intensive course in Hongkong.

4) Try to use recent books and tapes, i.e. from the 90s or later. Exception: Sidney Lau's books.

5) Do not worry much about reading and writing. It is a different language anyway. However, knowing the character for a word helps after some time, as it helps you distinguishing cases where you have the same word from cases where it is just a homophone. From my experience this helps a lot in memorising new vocabulary.

6) Never neglect the tones. Treat them always as a part of the word, just as the vowels and consonants."

"Having learned them by heart like the rest of the word. There is no other way than to take them seriously and to treat them as just an important part of the word as e.g. the initial consonant. If you learned a word, and got the tone wrong, it is not 90% right, it is wrong. In my private phonetic spelling for Cantonese, I use invented letters for the tones. That puts them visually on the same level of importance as the other parts of a word, which helps psychologically to take them seriously."

"Much less than in the beginning. However, I still make more mistakes on tones than with other phonetic parts of the words, which is a consequence of not having given them the same importance all the time."