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Cantonese Odyssey 2012 -Team 龍 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 57 of 67 31 January 2012 at 7:22am | IP Logged | ||
At the moment I wouldn't recomment CC101 to anyone, but I'm getting somewhere with these transcription corrections. Hopefully once the transcriptions are decent, I can talk to them about things like their "Cantonese" dictionary, too. But it's a pretty slow process, since I'm doing these corrections during my spare time, and since I'm talking to people at InnovativeLanguage, who in turn are talking to the people working specifically with CantoneseClass101. So far, I'm still trying to establish a standard for how to deal with things like tone changes and variant characters, but once that's done, I should be able to work through the transcripts at a speed of a few a week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4927 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 58 of 67 31 January 2012 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had some serious reservations about CantoneseClass101.com when I signed up, but since they said they were coming up with revised courses, I thought to give it a shot and see how it is. A big plus is that they use JyutPing and not Yale romanization, making characters they use easier to look up in Cantodict, but even then I had misgivings.
They seem to have slapped this one together as an afterthought. Best of luck with what you are doing for them. Maybe in 2013 they will have a much stronger product. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4927 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 59 of 67 31 January 2012 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Originally a double-post about the relative merits of CantoneseClass101.
I will ask for a refund of my purchase price; with so many small fundamental details wrong, I have no faith that the big things are also correct. Edited by zhanglong on 08 February 2012 at 5:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4927 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 60 of 67 03 February 2012 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been listening to Cantonese audio to fine-tune my ear and be able to respond quickly.
I spent a lot of time yesterday attempting to recognize tones. The goal is to be able to "see" the tone as soon as I hear the word. As an experiment, I'm attaching a visual contour to every tone I hear; six tones, six pictures, just so that I can recognize what I am hearing and can reproduce it when I have to. I realize this may be over-kill. Native speakers don't think like this; but they have years of listening and responding to tone languages so to approximate their ability, I've got to do different things. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4927 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 61 of 67 08 February 2012 at 5:10am | IP Logged | ||
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I continue to listen to Cantonese each day from a variety of sources.
I don't concern myself much anymore with the characters. My goal is to be able to understand spoken Cantonese when I hear it, so the best thing for that is massive audio input. I'm experimenting with Gradint. I downloaded the application, installed the English prompts, and the Cantonese voices into their appropriate directories. Then I added the vocabulary and definitions from Teach Yourself Cantonese and am learning five words a day(!). More importantly, I want to rip audio sentences from native sources and start inputting entire sentences; later I will also record native prompts so that it will be all Cantonese. This weekend my homework will be how to leverage ANKI and Gradint to help me reach my language goals faster. Finally, I got FSI Cantonese parts 1 and 2 bound into a single book here. It's a massive text now, but enough for me to reference while listening to the lessons. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4927 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 62 of 67 29 March 2012 at 2:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Mainlanders are still amazed that a foreigner would come to China and try to learn Cantonese. I might as well be studying calligraphy or anything else that they don't think is particularly useful for getting a job.
A colleague boasted about how much money he walked away from in the West to come to China. The girl he was trying to impress gave him a quizzical look: "you walked away from MONEY?" --- One thing I find interesting. In my own case, it may be easier to find a Cantonese study partner in the U.S. than in Guangzhou. Not because people here can't speak it, because a significant part of the population does. It's because most of the people I know are so busy that they can't devote much time to luxuries like language exchange. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 63 of 67 29 March 2012 at 7:07am | IP Logged | ||
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One thing that fascinated me when I lived in Foshan was that people don't seem to have hobbies. For me it's sort of a given that you have something outside of work that you do for enjoyment (like language learning), but when, during my short bout of English instruction, I asked students to introduce themselves with their name and something they liked doing on their spare time, I got a single student out of a dozen who said "I like to play badminton". The rest gave answers like "eat at a restaurant" or "sleep", or even "I don't have spare time".
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4927 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 64 of 67 08 April 2012 at 1:34am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, one of my coworkers has no hobbies. She only likes to eat and watch tv with her boyfriend. I asked her, so...where do you guys go? "Nowhere. We just go to restaurants, laaaa." 1 person has voted this message useful |
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