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Written Cantonese Spoken Japanese 鵲TAC14 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 1 of 19 21 December 2013 at 7:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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Alright here's my log specifically dedicated to studying Cantonese in 2014.
Background & Interests: Cantonese was the first language I ever tried studying on my own, and by far the most important to me. My interest is studying languages is motivated by my interest in film history and I'm absolutely obsessed with Cantonese films. Though a lot of Cantonese films are subtitled in English, this mainly applies to stuff made around 1965 and later, and I would really love to be able to watch some earlier Cantonese films. I also want to learn Written Chinese so I am able to read more film history books on Chinese cinema. I started studying Cantonese roughly 1 year ago, and made some good progress, but ultimately my techniques didn't push me as far as I wanted them too. Though I did spend some time studying Chinese characters before, I've come to believe that this will be an important tool for pushing my studies forward as a self studier with no immediate access to native speakers and focus spread over a few different languages. I also used to think resources for Cantonese were a bit on the slim side, but I've been able to unearth quite a few really solid ones, and I think they'll be enough to eventually push me to the Intermediate level so I can start using Cantonese cinema as my main form of study. Main Goal: My main goal for the year is to learn 1000 colloquial Cantonese characters, but I'm hoping to achieve more than this. Main Courses & Textbooks: Reading and Writing Chinese - 1000 Traditional Chinese characters and how their meaning came to be, my main source for getting into written Chinese. The University of Arizona Critical Language Series - This seems to be by far the most comprehensive Cantonese course out there. I haven't seen quite how far it is, but there seems to be quite a bit of content presented each way. Each lesson has the dialogue in video and written out in Colloquial Written Cantonese characters, and you can click for the native pronunciation of any individual word, or a separately recorded audio track for the whole sentence. I also think I'm going to rip all the content of the course into an Anki deck to make sure I learn every by heart. Sydney Lau - This seems to be the real grammar workhorse book of studying Cantonese. Nice dialogues in Colloquial Written Cantonese + unofficially recorded audio available on the internet, and lots of great grammar drills. I've often though that making an Anki deck out all the vocab, drills and dialog would be the ultimate Cantonese learning tool, but being only available in book form, it would be quite time consuming to type that all up. How to Speak Cantonese - This is a really old but really incredible Cantonese study book. There's no audio, but basically it kind of runs in an Assimil format, only it has 4 columns, Colloquial Written Cantonese, Idiomatic English, Romanization, Literal English. There are 50 dialogues in all, but they go from very simple to much longer and more complicated than Assimil dialogues. After I've finished the courses with audio, I hope to learn all these dialogues in detail. FSI Cantonese - I don't think this is quite as good as some of the other FSI courses out there, but there's no doubt there's a lot of content in here, and I will try to master it. Thankfully some members on the Cantodict forum typed up all the dialogues in Written Cantonese DLI Cantonese - The quality has ups and down, but this is a really thorough and lengthy Cantonese courses with audio. No written Cantonese for the main dialogues, but after getting a footing with the other courses I'll try and master this mammoth course. Teach Yourself Cantonese - I wasn't originally too wild about this course as a beginner, because it doesn't have English translations of the dialogues. But it does have Colloquial Written Cantonese and audio, so I will see if there's anything to be extracted from here after going through some of the other courses. Anki - this has probably been my most useful for studying Cantonese and will probably be my main tool for the beginning of this year while I focus on other languages. I've finished a deck that had the 350 most common Cantonese characters. Right now I'm working through the 500ish, level 1 words from Cantodict. After that I have all the FSI dialogues. And from there I have 5000ish level 2 words of Cantodict, and hopefully I'll convert one or several of my Cantonese courses into decks and go through the 5000 Cantonese character deck, and then hopefully after all that I'll be able to start using S2SR to study directly from Cantonese films. Going through all that is definitely way in the long term though. Its gonna be a long slow path, but hopefully it will land me at my goal of learning Cantonese through self-study. Edited by YnEoS on 19 April 2014 at 3:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Maux Diglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 4628 days ago 37 posts - 51 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 19 21 December 2013 at 9:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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You've clearly done your homework in regards to the materials. I have some idle hope that one day when I feel sufficiently confident in Mandarin I may try tackling Cantonese as well, and your listing of resources already goes well beyond just having a good starting position, especially considering you've not neglected the written form of expression.
Regarding your goals. You mentioned you'd at least like to master a 1000 traditional characters during the next year using McNaughton's book. As you no doubt already know, written Cantonese uses a large amount of characters of it's down devising (hence, not listed in McNaughton), but then again, that's what you'll have the transcripts for with the other textbooks you've mentioned. However, how will you be tackling these? It certainly seems like a very large amount of material to work through in just one year, especially considering you're also studying other languages at the same time. Do you have any specific goals for which of these books you'd like to finish during the next year? If you think it might help, perhaps you can also set subgoals, like, by the end of January I want to have covered an x number of characters from McNaughton and a y number of chapters from book z. Anyway, good luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6975 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 3 of 19 21 December 2013 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It’s nice to see another Cantonese log on the board! I look forward to reading about your progress and accomplishments. I’m also studying Cantonese (albeit while living in Hong Kong), and am planning to learn more Cantonese characters this upcoming year.
I used the Sidney Lau books earlier this year, and I really liked them, although there are some outdated vocabulary and archaic structures. I suppose it’s not much of a problem if you want to be able to understand old movies, but you might want to be mindful if you are planning to speak with people from Hong Kong. I have mixed feelings about “Teach Yourself Cantonese.” The book has some interesting material, but it also has a lot of vocabulary that isn’t particularly useful. Have you looked at any of the books by Greenwood Press? I’ve only used their intermediate level stuff, but I just went through their textbook “Living Cantonese” and it’s got a lot of very useful colloquial Cantonese sentences and vocabulary. All of their books come with traditional Chinese characters and CD audio, and I think you can order some of the books in the US. Good luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 19 21 December 2013 at 5:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks! I'm actually primarily studying characters through Anki, and all my decks have included Cantonese-only characters. I'm working through the McNaughton primarily to get a sense of how characters are constructed and to learn the various radicals. If I'm not mistaken all the colloquial Cantonese characters should just be sound loans from standard Chinese with mouth radical and a new meaning. Its hard to say how many courses I'll be able to get through this year. I'm starting out this year primarily focused just on characters while I focus on my other languages, but later in the year I plan on shifting my attention more heavily to Cantonese. I'll definitely start setting some sub-goals then once I start working through some of the courses and get a better idea of my methods and pace. Best of luck with your Mandarin studies!
Thanks! I've enjoyed reading your log, can't wait to see how your study of Cantonese character goes. Yeah I'll be using lots of old courses for Cantonese, which will probably create an issue with communicating for a while. It will probably be several years before I can make a trip to Hong Kong though, so hopefully when that time comes I'll be studying more native materials to help update my language a bit. Greenwood press seems to have a really nice collection of Cantonese books, I just am not really sure which of their beginner books are best to start with. I do plan on using some of their intermediate readers later on in my studies as well as their book Learn Chinese Using Cantonese to help me with reading standard written Chinese texts. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 5 of 19 22 December 2013 at 8:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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First update for the new log. It's probably going to be fairly boring until I start picking up my studies later in the year. So I decided I'm going to also try and discuss some Hong Kong films I've watched recently as well using the chinese characters for the films and people who made them. Reason being when I started studying French, I found it really easy to remember vocabulary I knew from film titles, so I'm gonna see if this concept works with Cantonese. Also it will be useful to get used to seeing the titles written in Chinese so I can easily recognize them when I start reading films books. I'll keep these two seconds separate in case readers aren't interested in one or the other.
Studies At the moment I'm using McNaughton's Reading and Writing Chinese for extensive practice and Anki for intensive practice. I'm studying 25 characters from the McNaughton every day but just seeing how they're contructed and writing them out, then moving on and not worrying about memorizing everything. This is just to help me paint a big picture of how radicals function in Chinese characters. Right now I've done 450 characters on my first pass, I plan on doing several more waves before I start trying to commit these to memory. With Anki right now I'm in the middle of the 500ish level 1 compound words on Cantodict. So far there haven't been a lot of new characters, but it's been really really great review for the 350 base characters I've already learned and nice for improving my vocabulary. For example I always used to get the characters 住 and 在 mixed up when studying characters individually, but since learning the compound word 住在 I never confuse the two. I've also recently stopped confusing 坐(sit) and 來(come, which now seems like the simplest thing to remember since 坐 has the two people radicals on top of the earth radical, but it took me a while to realize I was confusing them and then to notice which aspects of them were different when studying with just Anki. Movies Recently I've been watching lots of 1970s Golden Harvest films which are mostly Mandarin Language. One of the highlight was 鐵娃(None But the Brave, 1973) a kung fu film directed by 羅維 (Lo Wei) and starring 鄭佩佩 (Cheng Pei Pei) and in a smaller role 田俊 (James Tien). It was also really refreshing they cast Japanese actor Joe Shishido as the main villain, instead of some Chinese actor with a giant mustache and vampire fangs. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Silbermond Diglot Groupie United Kingdom xuexisprachen.wordprRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4359 days ago 64 posts - 79 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 6 of 19 02 January 2014 at 12:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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Like Maux, I'm sort of interested in looking at Cantonese one day when I feel like my Mandarin is strong enough, so I'm definitely interested in keeping an eye on your log this year. And I love that you're doing learning through films, so I'm going to be all over those sections of your log too :P.
Good luck with this year, teammate :D! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 7 of 19 04 January 2014 at 1:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks, best of luck with your Mandarin and Russian too!
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 8 of 19 05 January 2014 at 5:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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First Log Update of 2014
Studies Nothing terribly exciting going on recently, I'm on 800 characters of my first pass through McNaughton's Reading and Writing Chinese. I noticed some of the "compound words" from Cantodict are what I would think of as basic sentances rather than compound words. Still a little grammar refresher never hurt. One interesting word that came up was 肥仔 (fatso/fatty) which I recognize from all the 洪金寶 (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) movies that I watch. Movies More Mandarin films, pretty unavoidable when it comes to 1970s Hong Kong cinema. Most recently I've been watching some films directed by 黄枫 (Huang Feng) most of which star 茅瑛 (Angela Mao) and have choreography by 洪金寶 (Sammo Hung) early in his career before he started directing and starring in films. Most of his films from this era focus on some kind of foreign martial arts style like 合氣道 (Hapkido, 1972) and 跆拳震九州 (When Taekwondo Strikes, 1973) which both take place in Korea. Also 中泰拳壇生死戰 (The Tournament, 1974) which takes place in Thailand. My favorite of the films though was 密宗圣手 (The Himalayan, 1976) which co-stars superkicker 譚道良 (Dorian Tan Tao-Lian or "Flash Legs"), and was shot in Tibet and Nepal. Most of the film focuses on the villain played by 陳星 (Chan Sing) who does a great job of being the most diabolical person ever. This period is sometimes considered a "low point" in the kung fu genre since it takes place after 李小龍 (Bruce Lee)'s death in 1973 but before 成龍 (Jackie Chan) and the Kung Fu comedy genre got really popular in 1978. Still even though Kung Fu genre wasn't breaking down box office records like usual, there's still a lot of good stuff, and the films mentioned above in particular have much higher quality of fight choreography than one typically sees during this period. Edited by YnEoS on 05 January 2014 at 2:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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