Cantonese Learning Website
“A Tale of Two Cities” (1859) is a historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. We translated the first few sentences into Cantonese. You can try to write down what “tones” of the characters are when listening to the audio clips. Continue reading “A Tale of Two Cities”
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There is another way to practice reading numbers in Cantonese. It is to memorize the multiplication table. As I said in the video, it is a secret of why Chinese people calculate so fast. If you are familiar with the table, you can treat multiplication as addition.
For example, 87*56, you can treat it as addition of 350+4000+42+480.
Continue reading “Multiplication Table – Pi song 乘數表，Pi 歌”
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The most common used Cantonese pronunciation system is jyutping 粵語拼音, for it does not only give you the sound, but also give the tone. In tonal languages, different tones of a sound can make a great difference of meaning. For example, 媽 (maa1) and 嫲 (maa4) mean mother and grandmother respectively. If you can’t speak it in right tone, it will become a joke! There is a shortcut to master the “Nine Tones”. You can practice the numbers (3-9-4-0-5-2-7-8-6). The sequence the above order is exactly from Tone 1 to Tone 9. Try it and you will get the feeling.
* when we say 媽媽 (mother) in Cantonese, we sometimes pronounce it maa4 maa1. Continue reading “Cantonese “Nine” Tones 廣東話九聲調”
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