For the past few months, I’ve been studying from multiple books and resources. The most challenging is “Advanced Level Current Cantonese Colloquialisms”.

The book covers “current” colloquial expressions and conversational slag. Though in my study, a few Native speakers have told me many of the words taught are very old-fashion and would not be spoken by today’s generation.

In some cases the vocabulary taught didn’t really match the English definition. It was very important for me to have a native speaker go through each word explaining when I should say it. For me, its very important to not look stupid saying words out of context or clearly mis-understanding the underlying meaning.

Dialogue (1:51 min):

Another challenge I had was that each track on the CD represented 1 unit or topic, making it extremely difficult to repeat vocabulary or dialogues over-and-over. There was also a lot of pauses between each word and sub-section. To solve this problem I recorded each CD track to my computer and used a WAV editor to split each track into smaller audio files. To effectively remember the words and phrases perfectly, I needed to repeat each word and dialogue at a higher frequency.

In addition, the dialogues didn’t feel like the standard TV or daily conversations heard. The amount of colloquial words and phrases spoken in each dialogue made it feel very unnatural and awkward. Though, I did listen to each dialogue and vocabulary list hundreds of times.