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.
ChallengesI'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 CantoneseEvery 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.
MusicMy most played Cantonese songs over the last couple of weeks have been:
黄色大门 and 唱广东歌
ResourcesI 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).