Talk:Cantonese

Cantonese Romanization
Seeing how I am the first big contributor to this wikibook, I felt I had to make a decision about the romanization system (otherwise no one could begin editing the lessons!). So I chose Jyutping because it's promted by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong and aspires to be a standard. Well, I am into writing the first lesson and I am beginning to have regrets:


 * 1) Out of all the Cantonese references I have, not one uses Jyutping.  I have two books bought in Hong Kong just a couple months ago from Greenwood Press (pub. 2004) that use a modified Yale (same as the system used by Matthews and Yip in their 1994 Intermediate Cantonese book).  Another character glossary (first pub. 1987 with another pub. date in 2004) uses the Sidney Lau system.  The Lonely Planet phrasebook uses the author's own creation.  Yet another coursebook uses a mainland Chinese system based on Hanyu Pinyin.  I believe the Foreign Service Institute textbook (published in the 70's) that I had before used the Yale system.
 * 2) Even with good familiarity of the material, I still find this romanization scheme confusing.  It's not intuitive for many English speakers.  For instance the "J" of "Jyutping" is not a "j" sound at all.  It's exactly like the "y" in "yard"!  And so the "yu" sound then?  That's the high front rounded vowel in French "tu".  From a linguists' prespective, Jyutping makes quite a bit of sense but not from the beginners' prespective!  (But I am a linguist and it still drives me nuts!)
 * 3) It has not been adopted as a standard as it was oringinally intended. As the books I have described above show, there has been no big shift (or any at all?) to Jyutping.  From my understanding, Hong Kong universities are currently using the Yale or a modified Yale system for teaching Cantonese to foreigners.  I don't believe that the Hong Kong government has ever declared any official romanization scheme (the one it uses for place names is quite ad-hoc and does not mark tones at all).
 * 4) The tone marks are not the best method for beginners.  Although Jyutping is easy to type because it doesn't require diacritics, I think the mixing of numbers and letters is really awkward for learners in my opinion.  English speakers do not mix numbers inside words and so we have a habit of ignoring numbers as "garbage".  But the numbers are critical because they represent the tones.  The Yale system using tone marks similar to Hanyu Pinyin which I think is much more useful for beginners.  We give a lot more attention to diacritics then numbers mixed into the word.

As someone who loves standards, I am really saddened by this dilemma. I thought that supporting Jyutping would be the "right" thing to do but it seems that it never caught on. Although Yale is slightly more troublesome to type, I think the tradeoff is worth it considering the learner's benefit and how popular it is in other Cantonese learning materials. Hence I'm deciding to go to the modified Yale system used in the two recent Greenwood Publisher books I have. This system is presented in Cantonese: Fundamentals of the language.

Seeing how there is not many other people here yet, I guess I am just talking to myself. However, I do believe the question "Why did you pick X romanization scheme over Y or Z?" is going to come up eventually. And it's plausible with all the different romanization camps out there, this will be a big controversy...so I am posting my reasons now rather than later.

--Alissa 14:35, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

There is a dictionary called Dictionary of Cantonese with Mandarin Phonetic Symbol(广州音字典 普通话对照)， published in 1983 by Canton People Publishing House. I will show some examples how the dictionary describes a word:

堞 die(e为第二声，我吾识打） [dib6碟] 城上如齿状的矮墙. （dib6中的6表示广东音中六中基本声调中的去声，跟“事”或“食”相同）

燃 ran(a为第二声） [yin4言] ... （4为阳平声调，跟“时”相同）

I am not intended to say that this system is suitable to describe Cantonese. I am just telling the existence of this dictionary. It seems that it is useful for people who already known Mandarin to learn Cantonese.

--Cameron Wong 16:40, 15 Aug 2005 (time zone of Beijing)

I have read books that teach Japanese to speak Cantonese, however, I forgot their names. There are a lot textbooks that teach Japanese to speak and to understand cantonese, since there are a lot of Japanese working in Hong Kong. You may found a lot of books in "Sogo" Department store in Hong Kong.

Forget the Jyutping. The key for a good textbook is "easy to learn", so don't stick to only one pronunciation system. If you have listen to Pimsleur's teaching materials, you'll find out that writing the pronunciation only help the reader to remember how they speak the language. The best way to teach pronunciation is to listen.

However, if you have to record the pronunciation into written text, use the one that reader understand.

For instance, in Jyutping, "陳" is represented by "can". It is quite reasonable that English speakers preceive "can" as the first syllable of "Canada" instead of the exact pronunciation of "陳". On the other hand, the pronunciation of "陳" is close the second syllable of English word, "merchant" without the "t" sound.

In addition, Jyutping is too hard for beginners. Personally, I don't think a standardized "Romanization" can help beginners to learn to speak cantonese quickly. Instead, "Romanization" always frightten beginners in their first language class.

Using "association" is more effective in "learning to speak" as well as "learning to listen". It is an alternative to represent the pronunciation of a word is to associate it to something readers have learnt before.

For instance, you may represent the pronunciation of "塵" same as that of "陳".

If readers are asked to listen to the word "陳", they will associate two different words, "塵" and "陳".

--Leo Wong 04:11, 22 Sep 2006 (GMT +8)

Contributors Guide
I stumbled upon this book a few weeks ago, and am interested in contributing to it. When I first found it, I noticed that the yet-to-be-created lessons were modeled after the Mandarin WikiBook, but I have noticed that xingmu has added some new content in Lesson 2 as well as updating the "How To Use This Textbook" section. It seems like the information that xingmu has added is pretty well organized as if it is part of a project that is well under development. My question is, would you like others to contribute as stated on your user page, or do you have a pretty good plan for where this book is going? I am by no means a linguist, but I have studied Cantonese for a few years and am interested in helping develop a good resource for learners. Let me know if there is anything specific you would like me to add, or if there are things you are already working on (so I know what not to add). If you would like others to help contribute, it would be good to create a contributor's guide. Thank you! I hope I can help out with this project. --Rtaggart 21:14, 30 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I added on a Contributor's Guide to the main page, adapting it from the Mandarin version, excising the sections that don't apply to the Cantonese Wikibook. It mostly covers multimedia contributions (stroke order images, sound clips), so if you have anything else to add about regular contributions, feel free.


 * Rtaggart, as for reservations about contributing, leave those behind. With the activity levels of most Wikibooks, an excess of content does not ever seem to be a problem. If you're concerned that effort may be lost through duplication or by a later change in book direction, then put your first efforts into fleshing out the plan. I'd say not to worry though. Grammar explanations and the like can easily be moved and reshuffled if the book structure needs to change. &mdash; Everlong 04:33, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Origin of this book
Did I oversee the reference from where this book was taken ? If the reference is not missing on the frontpage, then sorry and please forget the following part.

If there is no reference, I do not consider it good style not to tell where this book is taken from:

http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/Cantonese.aspx

Foreign Service Institute Washington USA 1970