How To Learn Cantonese

This was originally a series of separate posts; since I think it’s something that’ll be useful to all learners of Cantonese, I’ve edited it into a single, permanent page.  The original series goes into more detail. There’s a fair amount of jargon, but everything’s explained in the hyperlinked posts. In particular, if you don’t know what an SRS is, read this post.  My personal favourite is Anki, but there are others out there too.

The Method

This is how I’ve been learning Cantonese for the last 12 months.  The method is certainly not set in stone – bear in mind that it’s just something that works for me, and it might work for other people too.  It’s best if it’s followed step-by-step, but there can be some overlap between each stage.

1. Immersion and speaking (throughout)
2. Anki deck for Jyutping/Yale pronunciation (using reading/listening cards)
3. Anki deck for grammar/vocabulary (using a good textbook, progressive grammar and sentence hacking)
4. Learn Hanzi using the Heisig method
5. Learn to read Standard Chinese (may require some Mandarin study) and also learn to sing along to Cantonese songs

Immersion and Speaking

All the time, you should be listening to as many podcasts (or other audio) as possible, watching TVB dramas or anime dubbed into Cantonese (or whatever you like to watch, really), and talking with native speakers.  This takes priority over all other points, by the way – studying isn’t all that entertaining, but a small amount is necessary to progress as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Pronunciation

To learn Cantonese, you’re need to learn to read Jyutping, or Yale romanisations.  To do this, I’d suggest taking sentences with audio from CantoDict and creating an Anki deck.  The only goal of this deck is to read Jyutping words accurately, with the correct tones.  The question side is the Jyutping, and the answer side is the audio.  The meaning (in either English or Cantonese) and the characters are completely irrelevant.  You should also be listening to as much Cantonese audio as possible.

Why not learn characters initially, as for Japanese or Mandarin?  They’re not common enough to warrant learning – at least not for a long while.  You’re far, far more likely to hear Cantonese spoken than you are to see it written, and so learning the writings of the HK character set is not a good use of time.

Grammar

For your grammar study (necessary and not boring) you need to SRS logically progressing sentence pairs.  The grammar deck should go up to a high-intermediate level, so that you rarely come across unfamiliar constructions when listening to native Cantonese.

If you can understand how a sentence is put together, even if you don’t know each word, you’ve essentially comprehended what’s being said.  It’s easy to learn a new piece of vocabulary because you know what function it has.  This is because you’ll have seen sentences of that type hundreds of times.  Once you’ve established the word, you can easily drop it into one of your example sentences in your Anki deck.  Grammar is like a scaffold from which you can build up knowledge of the language.

I highly recommend Yip and Matthews, by the way – both the Basic and Intermediate Grammars.  They have plenty of good example sentences and explanations, and they also include literal translations for new sentence types.

Characters

If you want to learn to read, once you’ve learnt spoken Cantonese such that you can hold everyday conversations and follow TV and radio shows, you should go through Heisig’s “Learning the Hanzi”, which teaches you the writing and meaning of characters. The readings can be learned in context.

Standard Chinese

To the best of my knowledge, there are no courses on Standard Chinese syntax, so knowledge of Mandarin grammar is useful.  You need to go through a Mandarin grammar (adapting it for Cantonese) and create an Anki deck of sentence pairs – this time between Standard Chinese and Cantonese.  You can also then practice writing Standard Chinese sentences using the same Anki deck.

Finally, you can also start learning to sing Cantopop songs at this point, since it’ll reinforce your knowledge of Standard Chinese.

That’s it!

The most important thing to bear in mind is that learning Cantonese is fun.  Really.  You do have to do some “grinding”, but I’ve found that my way keeps boredom to an absolute minimum – no verb tables, no vocabulary lists, no writing out characters over and over until they’re bored into your skull, and lots of listening, reading and speaking.

Best of luck!