Starting with Cantonese
October 30th, 2008 in Shanghai
I’m starting to study Cantonese, for reasons that will be made obvious at some point in the future. It’s easy/hard, because it’s very similar to Mandarin but there are basically no resources available for its study. I’ve been listening to the Cantonese dub of The Incredibles over and over, picking out words, and turning them into a growing core of Cantonese.
It’s a fun process.
A few Cantonese learning resources I’ve found thus far:
- RTHK Naked Cantonese podcasts
- CantoDict dictionary
Mostly, though, I’ll be learning through Pixar and Stephen Chow movies.
Nearby Posts
- Newer: Get your Juice on
- Older: Walking
October 30th, 2008
Or listen to some Cantonese pop songs
Dave’s Whiteboard » Blog Archive » Le scaphandre and the diving bell
October 30th, 2008
[...] morning I read Starting with Cantonese on John Biesnecker’s blog. John speaks Mandarin and is learning Cantonese. As he says in an [...]
October 31st, 2008
It’s time for your bosses to make a Cantonese Pod.
October 31st, 2008
@Mark, you’re preaching to the choir, my friend…
October 31st, 2008
I’m not ready to start focusing on another language just yet, but regardless it’s still fun to think about what I will focus on when I can.
Picking Japanese pack up would be the more sensible I think, but studying Cantonese has always appealed to me for a few reasons.
1) The challenge. People always talk about how hard it is and that makes it tempting. Also, as you mention, the lack of materials is another challenge in itself. (To which you’re obviously finding creative enough solutions to.)
2) It’s closeness to Chinese seems like it would help the process along. I could be completely wrong about that, but there’s gotta be some cognates! (low mein anyone?)
3) It sounds awesome. Nuff said. It’s cool as hell and when I was younger and watching kung-fu movies, that’s the Chinese I always wanted to speak.
Anyway, like I said, no time for it just yet, but I think I’ll start in a few years. (I second Mark’s request…)
December 1st, 2008
No resources? I think you should make a pit stop in HK before claiming it is so! Coincidentally the highest quality Shanghainese learning materials I’ve ever seen were only available in HK. I think it might have something to do with the better protection of IP + higher cost of books in HK making it more profitable/lucrative for authors there to produce quality materials. One of the nice looking Cantonese books I picked up in 龙之梦 had so many mistakes that I was correcting the tone marks. After one chapter I threw in the towel, cause I was literally contemplating hunting down the author and … to him for having the audacity to even such such rubbish.
My guess is you might be moving South?
December 2nd, 2008
Justin,
Cool, I’ll make sure to take a close look when I go to Hong Kong next.