Joined: Sep 2011
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Hello everyone.
I live in Sweden and due to my father being chinese(cantonese) I have always wanted to learn cantonese. However, I have no chinese relatives or friends besides my father who could help me.
So I bought Heising's Remembering Traditional Hanzi as suggested from a friend who was learning Kanji from the ajatt-technique. I have been learning a bit over 100 characters now but I'm not sure if I should move on, as I'm not learning how to speak at all.
That leads to my question. How should I be able to learn cantonese when all I have is the book which doesn't teach you how to actually speak at all? As the language is heavily based on tones I think learning it correctly is important, but how?
Is my only option taking expensive night courses or is there a way to learn on your own?
Joined: Sep 2010
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I would suggest you take a course, because it is essential to start with the proper pronunciation; you don't need to take courses all your life, though. Once you have internalized the pronunciation, then you can learn vocab on your own.
In my own case, I took 1 year Mandarin at the university and it gave me an excellent pronunciation, that I can't imagine I would acquired with tapes only.
The pronunciation takes some time getting used to, and this is why interacting with a (patient) human being will help you. You'll need to be actively corrected when you don't say things correctly. Tones are not natural to Swedish ears, so it is very easy to think one says one thing when in reality, one says something else. Give yourself a few months, perhaps a few years for it to become second nature.
Joined: Mar 2009
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How much is your Dad willing/able to help you learn?
In the beginning, having a native speaker who can work with you on tones and pronunciation is a huge help.
After that, I'd listen a lot, look for a good grammar book to learn from, maybe use an SRS to learn characters and eventually sentences or vocab.
Joined: Mar 2009
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Instead of a course, perhaps think about 5-6 hours of tutoring spread over a couple of weeks. Beyond a basic understanding of tones and pinyin, a course isn't going to help you very much.
If you don't feel like paying for tutoring, you could also think about a language exchange. There are tons of native Chinese speakers with good English that are more than willing to practice their English by teaching you basic pronunciation, etc...
Joined: Aug 2009
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I would seriously suggest you start off learning Mandarin first and move onto Cantonese later. There is basically no written Cantonese which is a serious handicap for the student who doesn't have an environment filled with Cantonese speakers; additionally, Mandarin learning resources are WAY easier to find than Cantonese ones. Once you're proficient in Mandarin you should find it very easy to switch to Cantonese.
For the record, I've learnt Cantonese for about 18 months to the point where it's useful at work, but I only started to make real progress since coming to Hong Kong 9 months ago. I started learning Mandarin properly as well a few days ago and it's been very easy to pick up, so I see no reason for that not to be the case the other way round.
Otherwise though, the many unnecessarily difficult things about Cantonese (mostly obviously the large differences between written and "spoken languages") almost made me give up a few times... try at your own peril...
Joined: Mar 2009
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I would add one point on top of donjorge22's argument for Mandarin over Cantonese, which is simply usefulness. You're much more likely to run into a Mandarin speaker who doesn't understand Cantonese than the other way around, and I believe this trend is only going to get more and more pronounced.
Good luck and 加油！
