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PopupCantonese vs CantoneseClass101 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6584 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 1 of 2 08 January 2012 at 7:32pm | IP Logged |
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So in my quest to improve my Cantonese, I've been looking at the two ChinesePod clones that deal with Cantonese: CantoneseClass101 and PopupCantonese. This is hardly a big review, but just some notes on my impressions after trying them both without giving any money to either. Maybe this can be of use for others looking for Cantonese instruction.
I've spent most time with CC101, simply because they have much more material. Both companies have focused on beginner and advanced material, lacking lessons in the middle. I've mostly perused the advanced material and it's clear that CC101 has a lot more than PC. CC101 has 50 lessons in the series "Advanced audio blog". These lessons are simply two-minute monologues about some feature of Hong Kong life with a transcript provided. The transcript is included as a "lyric" in the MP3 file, so you can conveniently find it on your iPod or computer. These audio blogs are pretty nice. I'm a bit annoyed at the fact that a large number of them are Mandarin read aloud with Cantonese pronunciation, but in a way that makes sense, as there's a point for advanced students to be able to do that, too (this is how Hong Kong people read Mandarin). Less forgiving am I when I find a mixture within the same lesson. It starts in Cantonese and then becomes Mandarin halfway through, apparently for no reason at all. Very strange. I've seen this in some writings by native Kongers, too, but it's probably a good idea for students to learn to separate the languages. Even worse, the quality of the transcripts is terrible. Some are written in simplified characters for no apparent reason, many use weird nonstandard characters (慨 instead of 嘅, 喺 for both second tone "hai2" and sixth tone "hai6", etc.) to write Cantonese morphemes. While Cantonese writing hasn't been officially standardised, most morphemes have one or a few commonly used characters and when teaching the language I'd certainly recommend keeping to these. And then there are the strange places where the transcript is written in Mandarin but it's still spoken in Cantonese. I don't know what to make of that, since most of the transcript is still in Cantonese. Working with these audio files, I find myself constantly having to make corrections in the transcripts. Apart from this, CC101 constantly gives me a "cheat people of their money" vibe. When signing up for a seven day free trial, I get an offer of completely free, no we mean it, it's really free in plain English free you just have to give us some money, extra material. Granted, the cost is only a dollar, but it smells like trying to soften me up and get me to give them my credit card information so that next time it's just a simple click to subscribe for a full year Premium membership. And to top it off they seduce me with their 2000 word "Core Cantonese vocabulary" list (neatly divided into several levels). This is something I might be willing to pay for, since it's hard to get such a thing on the web, but they gave me a free taste of it and I soon discovered it was simply Mandarin with added Jyutping transcriptions. If you try to use that "core vocabulary" on the street people will laugh at you. So much for CC101. Is PopupCantonese better, then? Well, yes and no. They certainly seem more friendly and the few instances of calling Mandarin "Cantonese" look more like temporary placeholders for their Cantonese material. As I understand it the site is still quite new and it's a copy of the PopupChinese site, which explains the pinyin I see here and there (such as in their "Cantonese" tools). But when you make a search in their dictionary, the results are real, honest Cantonese, albeit not a lot of it. And this is PopupCantonese's big problem. It doesn't have a lot of material. Seven advanced lessons, a decent number of beginner lessons and also no intermediate ones. Worse, they're not publishing on a regular schedule. It seems it's largely the same team that's responsible for PopupChinese and -Cantonese, and the Cantonese version just isn't a priority. With no schedule and no indication on how many lessons I can expect if I sign up, I'm not going to give them money no matter how much I like them. Their lessons are quite good. I've listened to a few Advanced lessons and they're lively, natural discussions in Cantonese. I can't get the transcripts without paying, so for me, they're unfortunately not much more useful than just listening to RTHK, the Hong Kong radio station. I listened to an elementary lesson and there is certainly a quality difference between them and ChinesePod. Cpod has very natural banter and good actors performing the dialogues, whereas PopupCantonese has obviously scripted banter and clearly non-pro voice actors, meaning the entire lesson gives off a stiff and non-natural feeling. There are jokes, but they are clearly written beforehand and read aloud from a piece of paper. As I said, I can't access the transcripts without paying, but searching in the dictionary gives me examples I suspect are taken from the dialogues, and they look pretty alright. --- In conclusion, I decided to give money to neither of these. CC101 I don't like, and PopupCantonese, no matter how much I want to subscribe, don't have a regular publishing schedule and have very few lessons up. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6381 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 2 09 January 2012 at 3:27am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the review. I signed up for the free trial of PopUp Cantonese and didn't find it interesting enough to continue. I still get tons of spam from them...
1 person has voted this message useful |
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