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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4928 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes  Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 25 of 169 04 June 2011 at 2:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Pimsleur 4 has some very useful patterns and vocabulary:
ngo5 gong2 dok6 m4 hou2. I speak not good. nei5 gong2... you speak dok6 - a particle used to describe an action (度) EDITED 6/5/2011: Thanks, Ari! bin1 dou6 - where? hai2 ni1 dou6 - located here hai2 go2 dou6 - located there --- Fieldwork: At a party, many of the Chinese people happened to be from Guangdong province! :) One of the foreigners, who looked to be Colombian, looked at me blankly when I spoke to him in Spanish, so despite the fact that his girlfriend was Colombian, he was Indian. ( lesson? Speak English to foreigners...) Another girl there who was Indian informed me that she was raised in Hong Kong, so her two native languages are English and Cantonese! ( lesson? In Guangzhou, ya never know ). My Cantonese actually occasioned another kind of exchange: one local exchanged taijiquan lessons for a quick salsa tutorial. It was surreal to hear southern Chinese people scream out "Chinese Gong Fu!" while dancing mambo and performing Chen Taijiquan in an Irish bar. Thank you, Paul Pimsleur... Edited by zhanglong on 05 June 2011 at 2:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 26 of 169 04 June 2011 at 9:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Should be second tone: "go2". Also, that's "dou6", not "do6". There's a very common construction "hai2 dou6", which can mean either "here" or "there" depending on the context. Usually it means "here", though. Also, listen to how people pronounce the initial 'n' in characters like "nei5" and the initial 'ng' in characters like "ngo5". In most cases, you'll find that an initial 'n' is pronounced like 'l' ("lei5") and an initial 'ng' is silent "o5". This is called "lazy sounds" ("laan5 jam1"). It works like this: Most people agree that the initial 'ng' should be pronounced and that an 'n' should be pronounced differently from an 'l'. But very few people actually do. What's more interesting, most people think they do. Pretty much only newsreaders and a few actors consistently use the "correct" pronunciation. Some people try, and there are books written about this to teach people the "correct pronunciation", but most people who do try fall victim to hypercorrection. They'll say "naan4 sik1" for "blue", despite the fact that there's never been an 'n' there. They'll also say "ngaam1" for "correct, suitable", despite the fact that historically, the 'ng' initial only appears in characters of tone 4, 5 and 6. If you want to speak Cantonese like it's actually spoken, I'd recommend you to use lazy sounds. A tip: look up the RTHK podcast called "Naked Cantonese". It has some fun expressions, it can compliment your Pimsleur and the Norwegian woman uses the actual pronunciation, as opposed to the theoretical one used in Pimsleur. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4928 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 27 of 169 05 June 2011 at 3:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Mandarin:
currently working on HSK Level 1, Using each word in a sentence. HSK Level 2, recognizing the characters. Cantonese: downloaded and installed the StarDict dictionary with Cantonese slang and other definitions. The 10 second review? It seems interesting but nowhere near as useful as Cantodict. --- Fieldwork: I'm getting increasingly better at meeting local, Guangdong people, who are extremely supportive of this effort to learn Cantonese. Also, I met someone who is an actual graduate of the 21st Century FSI language program. Needless to say, the public domain FSI materials are not what's used today to train people to work in another country. This individual achieved Level 3 proficiency in Mandarin in approximately six months. If anyone is interested, I'll interview him and get more details about the current state of FSI training. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hkboy Groupie Hong Kong Joined 5675 days ago 65 posts - 86 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cantonese, Mandarin | Message 28 of 169 07 June 2011 at 2:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi Zhanglong,
I had lost your log but obviously I've found it again. You are lucky you have Ari following you. He really knows his stuff and he loves Cantonese. I'd be interested to hear your feelings on learning the 2 languages together. I started out with Mandarin in HK but then switched to Cantonese when I found out nobody around me really liked it. I then tried to study them together but really didn't seem to get anywhere. I've since spent the last 3 1/2 years on Cantonese. I'm still doing Cantonese but now I'm studying Mandarin again. Good luck with your studies and I'll be watching your progress. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4928 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 29 of 169 07 June 2011 at 5:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks, hkboy.
I planned to go to Hong Kong to pick up the Sidney Lau books and to visit Hong Kong University yesterday, but the Dragon Boat festival made that difficult to do. So I'm going in a week. Ari is very helpful and quite knowledgeable. I'm glad he's a member here. I'm having to rely on Mandarin a lot more in Guangzhou than on Cantonese. I always have to ask people where in China they are from. As much as I don't want to, I have to focus more on Mandarin, just to do the simplest of things, so I study Mandarin first, as a matter of survival. If I finish my Mandarin homework, then I can "play" with Cantonese. The good thing is, since I have different goals for each language (L3 for Mandarin and L2 for Cantonese), I haven't *yet* gotten confused and have been able to use knowledge of one to reinforce the other. As a pet project, maybe I will write a mini-dictionary of Cantonese using my own Mandarin definitions. More importantly, I need to make sure I speak to local people every day to improve one or both languages. Mandarin fieldwork: Comparisons 相比 (x) 我根更喜欢 (y). Compared to x, I most like y. Useful phrase 我要一瓶冰的啤酒。 I want a bottle of cold beer. 瓶 ping2 is the measure word for bottle. 冰 bing1 is the noun / adjective for ice or ice-cold. Cantonese fieldwork: Just an observation. The Cantonese dictionary of 广东话，available in the local bookstore, uses what appears to be the Guangdong Romanization scheme, which is yet another way to transcribe the sounds of Cantonese to a latin alphabet. I've recently found a Cantonese dictionary that uses jyutping romanization, that is entirely in Chinese. Cantodict would be nice if you could *change* the transcription scheme from jyutping to yale to lau to guangdong to whatever. I mean, it's probably the definitive electronic reference for the Cantonese language now, but everyone spells the same word differently. Perhaps its almost exclusive use of jyutping is a boon but the few written textbooks and dictionaries that exist have yet to change to jyutping. My mini-goal is to finish Pimsleur Cantonese in a week before I go to Hong Kong. More posts later! Edited by zhanglong on 07 June 2011 at 7:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hkboy Groupie Hong Kong Joined 5675 days ago 65 posts - 86 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cantonese, Mandarin | Message 30 of 169 07 June 2011 at 8:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Also, if you haven't already, pick up anything and everything by Greenwood Press. I think I've got everyone of their books.
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| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4928 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 31 of 169 08 June 2011 at 5:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Cantonese:
Pimsleur 05 had an interesting construction: 係 hai6 - is, are, there is, there are 喺 hai2 - be at a place, be located 呢度 ni1 dou6 - here (x) 係 唔 係 喺 呢度 呀 (x) hai6 m4 hai6 hai2 ni1 dou6 aa3? (x) is not is located here? Is x here? 想 soeng2 - to want EDITED 9 June 2011 (Ari) There were other gems in the lesson. Soon I will post all of the Pimsleur vocabulary online. Mandarin: Picked up a standard textbook, twelve chapters long, about daily life in China. I will proceed through it lesson by lesson, while doing character recognition and HSK vocabulary drills. The textbook is for providing a context for all the words I am learning, reading practice in the simplified script, and a grammatical framework for what I encounter. Unlike Cantonese where I am basically writing the grammar in my head as I hear the language, much of the work for Mandarin is already done by the writers of the textbook. Yet another reason why I find Cantonese more fun! Fieldwork: Cantonese: spoke to a woman briefly on the elevator who was speaking to herself. As the elevator approached the second floor, she said " 二 ji6 樓 lau6*2" When I asked her in Mandarin if she was a Guangdong person, she smiled and said "you can understand a lot of Chinese!" I wish... At the bookstore, I purchased two books: 1) a Cantonese character dictionary, all in Chinese, that uses the Guangdong romanization. The definitions are all in Mandarin so it is interesting to see how the characters are described. 2) a treasure called "Cantonese-Putonghua in the Chinese Language". There were only three, very battered copies left, they looked used and some had ripped pages...but... it is an English language book ISBN: 978-7-5619-1009-2, published by Jinan University that contains 400 sentences. These 400 sentences are first written in Cantonese, using Cantonese characters, then they are written in Mandarin, using standard putonghua, then they are written in English. The vocabulary lists for each sentence are similarly organized, giving anyone a Rosetta Stone as it were for someone trying to learn two of the other languages if they know at least one. It is also very handy for comparing the grammatical and vocabulary similarities and differences between Mandarin and Cantonese and is a source of grammatically correct sentences upon which students can model their own speech. hkboy, Greenwood Press? What specifically should I look for? Edited by zhanglong on 09 June 2011 at 1:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 32 of 169 08 June 2011 at 7:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Soeng2, second tone.
Unless you've found a very rare treasure indeed, the definitions will only be about how the characters are used in Mandarin. Most likely the only thing Cantonese about it is the pronunciations (and do note that the Guangdong romanization is only used in Mainland China).
That sounds really great. A tip is to check the sentences against a native speaker. I bought a similar book (a large-format green one, not the one you bought) and it contained all sorts of oddities and very old-fashioned stuff that my girlfriend (from Hong Kong) didn't recognize or understand at all. Yours probably doesn't have that problem, but it doesn't hurt to check. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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