Cantonese Learning Experiences

"I had a chance to get room and board in a house owned by immigrants from Hong Kong; two members of the family did/do not speak English, so I figured I wasn't going to let that stop me from communicating with them. 9 years later, we're still together."

"That's correct, I knew no Cantonese or Mandarin whatsoever before moving into the household."

"I can pass for a native speaker on the phone until I make a tonal mistake; even then, most native speakers think I must be a Chinese Canadian - that is to say, ethnic Chinese born in a Chinese-speaking home, but born in Canada. However, I am a Caucasian guy, born into an English-speaking Canadian family. Out of 10? 8 or 9 or 10 depending on the topic/circumstances."

"We speak only Cantonese at home every day."

"Yes; as a matter of fact, my clientele are exclusively Cantonese and Mandarin speakers. I speak four languages typically in one day - I teach English and French, and serve my clients in Cantonese and Mandarin. 
Vancouver has one of the world's largest Chinese populations per capita (some 20 - 25% of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) is Chinese). I can do anything I want to in Chinese here (either Mandarin or Cantonese - my choice!); banking, going to a travel agency, eating out, shopping, getting gas, buying insurance, you name it. So it's a great opportunity to learn here."

"I can read enough to get through a newspaper, though I miss details. I can write letters, but I would not trust my writing in any academic capacity. I can read maybe 3000 - 3500 characters."

"I started off many years ago learning Japanese in University. It was a fairly intensive program, and the writing was emphasized. I learned perhaps 500 characters at that time, but most importantly it gave me the basis I needed (you know, with stroke order, and radicals, and so on). 

Then a couple of years later when I finally moved in with the Chinese family, we would watch TV every evening. Chinese TV shows are often shown with subtitles (so that speakers of other Chinese languages can follow along) - but the subtitles are in real time (like in a movie, as opposed to the delayed subtitles you get in "closed captioning".) Someone on the screen would say, "Lei ho ma?" (How are you?) and the 3 characters would appear at the bottom. We had a kids' Etch-a-Sketch, and so I spent evenings scribbling madly, writing down the subtitles and asking what the words were one by one. This was a great method. 

I then found I needed to improve my reaction time upon seeing characters, and nothing helped more than karaoke! I'm not a real karaoke fan in the first place, but it was a fantastic language-learning tool in terms of character recognition! I can't emphasize this enough."

"French (which is not foreign to Canada), Spanish, Mandarin, some Persian, some Japanese, some Italian."

"HELPFUL: Make a point of asking 3 questions every day about the language. Anything goes - it could be about vocab, grammar, or "why do you say it like this?" questions. 
UNHELPFUL: Consuming tv or radio passively and expecting you'll somehow just absorb the language. It doesn't happen unless you actively take a role in expanding your understanding of the language."

"You won't be surprised to hear me complain of tones, obviously. But I found multiple verb strings to be conceptually challenging when I first started learning; "Hurry up and go over there, pick it up, bring it back and give it to me" being expressed as "fast go take come back give me" - I found much meaning could be expressed with few words, and it took time for me to digest a single sentence."

"Grammar, and its ability to minimalize and retain meaning; which as I stated above was most difficult at first, but now that I "get it", it's one of the beautiful things about the language. "

"Ask, talk, ask, point, ask, ask, ask. Don't let the learning process get sideswiped by endless conversations of "Oh my gosh! You're so smart! How do you do it?" or "It's too hard, and you're pretty good for a "foreigner" anyway." Take control of your learning and attempt to express yourself in a number of different situations, regardless of how tough it is. Get a book that describes how tonal languages work."

"Basically, any linguistics typology textbook, or intro to linguistics will probably do, but I can recommend this title:"
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (affiliate link)

"Learning how tones sound in strings of words works MUCH better than learning tones independently. Try this trick: teach a non-native speaker of English about word stress by giving only a stressed syllable or an unstressed syllable. For example, try to teach the difference between "conTENT" and "CONtent" by showing ONLY the difference between "con" and "CON" and not saying the rest of the word "tent". It won't work!! They'll understand that you hear a difference and they may hear a difference, but they won't have any sense of how strong and weak syllables sound in relation to each other. In the same way, learn tone by practicing it in word strings. "YAT" (one) is no good to learn alone. Learn "YAT go yan", or "SING kay YAT", "YAT go SING kay" (one person, Monday, one week). I think it's practicing this contrast that will clinch the tones."

"Absolutely. I make more when I'm tired. I make fewer when I make a conscious effort to correct myself. I can now speak for long periods without making any tone mistakes, but then suddenly the tone monster comes and I find myself making several mistakes in a row."