Written Chinese/Cantonese pronunciation

The Cantonese characters pronunciation consists of three elements: syllable onset(聲母), syllable nucleus(韻母) and tone(聲調). A character consists of syllable onset(though some rare characters does not have this element), following by a syllable nucleus, with a tone for each character.

The concept of syllable onset and syllable nucleus can be explained by examing the english word "sing". When you pronounce this word, try to divide it to "s-" and "-ing". Note that the "s-" determines the shape of your mouth, and the "-ing" is the actual voiced part. That's the concept of syllable onset and syllable nucleus respectively. The tone is a special feature in Chinese language. There is a total of nine tones, and each character belongs to one of them. Note that there is no concept of stress in Chinese words - each word has only one syllable.

Syllable onsets
There are totally 19 syllable onsets in Cantonese. The following table shows their pronunciation guide: