Sat 12 Feb 2011
I’ve read on many expat and Cantonese forum posts people who are new to Hong Kong are asking for Cantonese teachers and private tutors. Even those that are asking for language exchange partners.
At a novice level you do not need a tutor or teacher! Yes that’s right, you don’t need a tutor to teach you how to speak Cantonese. A tutor at the beginning stage is simply a waste of money. Over the last many years living in Hong Kong, I’ve met around 15 or so westerners who all came with the intention to learn Cantonese. They were all psyched up and ready to get good without any actual study. After 4 years they cannot speak more than a few broken sentences, and that is simply to buy their cha-siu fan.
You also cannot just find any random native speaker to teach you Cantonese! Anyone who claims they can tutor or exchange Cantonese is conning you of your time and money! What you need to do is learn proper language learning methods. If you have time, go to Google and search for “krashen”, “comprehensible input” and perhaps “steve kaufmann”.
There is no short cut to learning Cantonese, other than lots of boring repetitive listening, and learning lots of words. Cantonese DOES HAVE grammar, but not in the same way as French might have. I once had a discussion with an ex-colleague from Germany who basically argued that Cantonese has no grammar and you could randomly string words together in any order. He spent more time learning *about* Cantonese than actually learning it!
Many people are convinced they can only learn from a classroom, and only learn by speaking to a native. You can be more efficient if you buy a book that has lots of dialogues, jyutping/yale, and mp3 audio. You simply need to map words to definition (I prefer to learn each word by translating into English first) and then repeating the audio 100-200 times or until you can basically memorise what you heard. Make targets or milestones by learning 200 new words per week! I used to learn 500 words per week back in my intensive study days several years ago. Also be consistent and stop being lazy!
You must learn a romanisation method (yale or jyutping) and know the tones. Otherwise, you will sound clumsy and not be able to properly look up new words in the online cantonese dictionary. Remember, learning new words is critical to getting fluent!
But I must have a tutor because I was brainwashed to believe a teacher is a must?
The cost for a Cantonese tutor is HKD$100/hour (1-on-1 private lessons) and that is someone who knows the 6 tones. You don’t need to pay more than this price and more expensive doesn’t make it any better. If you absolutely insist you need a tutor, have your tutor create dialogues for you by writing out 1 minute stories that teach you new vocab (10-15 new words per dialogue), go over all the vocab by telling you the meaning in English (or whatever your mother tongue is) and record the MP3. When your 1-2 hour lessons are finished, spend 4-5 hours per day listening to these dialogues over and over until you are sick of them! Repeat this every day (even holidays)!
But I’m not like you, I don’t have 4-5 hours per day as I’ve got a life and I have 100 other excuses….
Don’t be a wimp and stop making excuses. I spent 1 hour on the train/bus in the morning listening to my audio, 1 hour during lunch, 1 hour on the bus/train back home after work, 2 hours before bed etc etc…. that’s already 5 hours per day! Add an extra few hours while shopping, buying groceries, eating, going to the toilet, walking, jogging, at the gym!
Now you can see you can easily get 7-8 hours per day. Successful people don’t make excuses for why they cannot, they find ways of achieving things by doing whatever it takes to get there!
February 13th, 2011 at 7:09 am
Thumbs Up!
February 14th, 2011 at 2:14 am
Now, this is a blog post I like!
February 14th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
I like your blog and agree fully with what you say. But C’mon, 500 words in a week and you remember them all. That means in 3 months you would be at the 3000 (intermediate) word mark and 6 months at the 6000 (upper int./advanced). In 12 months you’d have excellent cantonese. Yeah right. Your blog is really good, don’t spoil it with this kind of off putting material thats easily found on other peoples blogs who know nothing about learning efficiently.
February 14th, 2011 at 3:08 pm
Hi Xia,
No body is saying you can remember them “all”. I can say with a solid 8 hours per day of repetition, regular listening and dedication; one is able to learn around 6000 words! This was the case for me!
Though what does that mean? It doesn’t mean you know how to use all the words correctly, it doesn’t mean you can instantly recall each word 100% correctly and accurately. It simply means you are familiar with this amount of words, and of course I would forget a good 30% of what I learnt for sure.
Even today, I forget words all the time and my vocab is quite good. I can generally participate in interviews, meetings and business transactions. Does this mean I’m perfect and know each word? No, but I can do well and people don’t need to resort to English in any situation!
It’s not the length of time which makes you have excellent Cantonese or not. You could be learning for 7 years and still know basics. Like me, I listened to the same boring stuff 1000 times until the speaker’s voice became my own internal voice in my head.
Learning efficiently is not watching TV with the hope that you can magically transmit words into your active memory, it is not going to a class twice per week for 3 hours and hoping some of it will brush onto you. It’s a matter of solid vocabulary acquisition through methods of reading, listening, translating and repetition.
So back to the point, no, I am not able to remember every single word I have encountered. But do you need to? Eventually words that were once forgotten will come back again in time when the situation presents itself and you will may/may not remember it then, but at least you’ve given yourself exposure at least once. This is far better than not being exposed at all.
I’m pretty sure that people who are incapable of learning are learning with the hope of finding a magic pill that can effortlessly learn a language through perhaps osmosis. Though, it does take ridiculous patience, it does take consistency and it does take motivation.
I use LingQ to learn French. The system tracks the “encountered/known” words, and after 1 year I know 8000 words.
Thanks!
February 15th, 2011 at 6:47 am
I agree with your concept of learning. Vocabulary is the key to understanding a language. I found this blog about two years ago. I am of chinese descent, but born in Australia, but could not understand much chinese.
I took the time to learn cantonese vocabualary through translating news articles…and after six months i could read chinese and had an intermediate/advanced level vocabulary. Now i am learning Korean, but find it diffult to learn new vocab beacause of the conjuncation stems. It is much more difficult, and had to revise my methods of learning a language.
I am curious to what langauge resources you use to learn french and cantonese. I listened to your short diagalogues your wife made and they are great…especially for repetition practice! They helped me out a lot, but i can’t seem to find anything on the net for chinese or korean. Also, can i ask why you are learning french? Do you plan on going there for a short period of time?
Thanks,
Patrick
February 15th, 2011 at 12:10 pm
@Patrick: Hi, thanks for visiting my blog.
For French I’m really only using LingQ to learn it. It has a massive library of content (text + mp3) and is easy to keep track of new words etc.
For Cantonese, I’ve described throughout my blog somewhere that I basically only use the content from what my wife made for me and some old random books I found at book stores etc. Don’t forget I’ve lived in Hong Kong for many years now, so I generally have more opportunity to use the language in daily life.
I don’t plan on going to France or other French speaking countries until I can speak French extremely well. The standard would be that people would think that I basically grew up in France for a good portion of my life.
Why I’m learning? Well, I love the language for some unknown reason. I don’t learn languages because it has 1 billion people like many other people do. For me, motivation plays a big part in being successful. If we follow the crowd, we’re not going to have solid motivation and eventually we’ll give up as we won’t be patient to stick through the difficulties and challenges.
Thanks!
February 16th, 2011 at 7:52 am
Hi!
Just wanted to say thanks for the splendid info, it really motivated me to keep logging in those hours ^^ Do you have any recommendations on what material I can use to learn jyutping? I’ve found some websites online but they are hard to understand since they don’t include an audio clip of some sort. There are also some websites in canto, but I can’t read anything but english…so it’s hard to navigate. Please, if you do know of any, let me know! I’m kinda in a rut because I can’t write down the right tones when I’m learning new vocab. Thanks a bunch!
February 16th, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Hi Sherry,
You can find a pronunciation guide here: Jyutping Pronunciation Guide
For myself and most people I know who’ve learnt it, we didn’t directly make an effort to figure out how to learn Jyutping. It comes very quickly after you’ve read and heard enough monologues/dialogues over and over.
So on my site here, I’ve provided a whole bunch of text and the MP3 clips. All you simply have to do is keep listening while following the text and you’ll get a hang for the pronunciation and spelling.
I never found it helpful to read a guide on learning how to pronounce French words for example, I simply read and listened at the same time and eventually learnt the correct sounds for each word.
Thanks for visiting my blog!
February 17th, 2011 at 1:08 pm
你好!.. 無意中搵到呢個blog~
打聲招呼…^_
February 17th, 2011 at 2:43 pm
I really enjoyed the post. I congratulate you on your Cantonese. How long were you doing this 5 hours a day of listening before you felt comfortable in the language?
Also, did you change anything in your studies when you started French?
February 17th, 2011 at 3:37 pm
Hi James,
Took 3-4 months before I could get a grip of general daily conversations. Though of course I would not be solidly comfortable. I’ve lived in Hong Kong for many years now, so even today there are some but not many instances where I’m still not comfortable.
Recently, I have hired a tutor to meet me 2 hours per week to learn very complicated phrasing or correct my outdated bookish language to more local expressions. Though as I’ve mentioned, a tutor is not needed at the beginning.
For French it’s a little easier to learn it since I can read French as it follows a Latin based alphabet. So I do much more reading in French and aim to achieve a professional proficiency much sooner than in Cantonese. Cantonese is very hard to sound professional unless you watch and read the news all the time.
Thanks.
February 25th, 2011 at 8:15 am
32 yr old here, a bbc from Scotland. still cant get better than the basics which i find easy but have looked into cantonese TTS and found ekho. Hope it’s of some use to you. Doubt i can ever speak cantonese anywhere good as a HK person. Know enough to get me by even though i watched hundreds of HK movies.
Here’s the link
http://e-guidedog.sourceforge.net/ekho.php
February 25th, 2011 at 8:17 am
Forgot to add….
enjoyed reading your blog and about your progress
February 25th, 2011 at 8:30 am
Ray S,
God bless you! You surely did your good deed for the day! I’ve been looking for a text to speech software/site for years… Ok, maybe not for years, but I looked for it for awhile but thought they didn’t have a site like this for Cantonese, only for Mandarin… I think I need to rethink my study methods now that I knwow about this site. Hahaha
Many thanks!
March 22nd, 2011 at 7:17 am
500 words a week? Possible with European languages but is it with the Chinese characters? They seem to me much harder to learn. I’m very curious to hear from you how harder is to remember a Chinese character than let’s say a French word? You’re experienced in both of the languages.
March 25th, 2011 at 7:33 am
@Igor: Easily 500 words per week with 70% retention rate.
I didn’t learn Chinese characters at the start, so for me it made no difference to any other lang. Reading a Chinese character is certainly hardcore and hence why I gave up learning characters a long time ago.
Hence remembering French and Cantonese words for me has the same difficulty. Nowadays, I only need to encounter a new word a few times and I can retain it in either language including English.
March 30th, 2011 at 4:33 am
hi everyone
back with an update. I have found another TTS
http://www.linguatec.net/onlineservices/voice_reader/ the best i’ve come across so far but is web based.As for the program itself to include cantonese speech will cost € 499,00. I also tried texttowav and textaloud found out again freeware never as good and eventually crash and return an error code.
Can anyone suggest a commercial tts software to buy from HK? i have family going there next week
July 13th, 2011 at 5:41 am
Hi everyone,
I’m Emily and I am a Texan who used to live in Hong Kong a few years ago. I served a religious mission there for about 2 years and before that, I had never heard a word of Cantonese or Mandarin. Through my pre-training, and my experience living in Hong Kong, I am now able to speak Cantonese Fluently. Outside of specialized business conversations or very topic specific vocabulary (for example: If someone wanted to talk extensively about astrology or chemistry), I can understand everything that is said to me, and can pretty much say anything that I want and be understood. I now teach Cantonese at a learning center to young adults who start out not even knowing how to say 你好(leih Hou). I have had great success with my students in the areas of speaking and understanding natives speak. I have also learned how to read while studying in university.
As someone who has learned Cantonese myself, and has successfully taught it to adults, let me shed some light on the conversation. Cantonese is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn, raking even more difficult than Mandarin. Don’t expect fluency in less than 2 yrs time, and that is even if you are studying extensively every single day. I would say that practicing 4-5 hours a day is not a far off shot from the truth. HOWEVER, I do not agree with the statement that at the beginning stages you don’t need a tutor. Cantonese is a TONAL language. The more you hear natives and copy them, the better your tones and sounds will be.
Studying Cantonese and performing in the language are two different things. When you converse with someone in Cantonese, you are speaking with a real person face to face; not speaking with a tape. Listening to conversations for 4-5 hours a day, i’m sorry, but its not an authentic way to study a language. I say this as someone who has studied asian language studies at the college level. And when I say authentic I mean that it’s not realistic and does not yield the results that you want. When you want to win an international acclaimed singing competition, you don’t practice by picking a song and singing along with a recording for 2 hours a day while sitting on the floor in a dark room. You have to practice, and then sing it in a performance hall with an audience: the same setting that that you would be faced with when you perform in the competition. Do you get my point? To the writer who said that you should “listen to conversations for 5 hours a day”, let me suggest a much more productive alternative: talk to people for 5 hours a day. REAL people. Yes that’s right. When you are on the train for an hour in the morning on the way to work, talk to the person next to you. Yes it’s scary at first, but Cantonese speakers are a lot more willing to speak with you than you might think, especially once they find out that you are trying to learn their language. If you start doing this, I guarantee that you will not need to listen to conversations for 5 hours a day. You will not need to review vocab words a hundred times with a 50% retention rate. Would you like a foolproof way to start learning more vocab and retaining it? Talk to more people. Would you like to practice your language with real natives for FREE? TALK TO PEOPLE. You can even ask them if your grammar is right on certain grammar principles WHILE you are speaking to them, and they will tell you free of charge. You might even make friends with some people and get an insiders view of the real culture of Hong Kong and the inner workings of how Hong Kong people think. Just trust me on this one. If you want to get better, you have to talk to more people. Language is absolutely no use if you are just listening to it all day. You have to actively use it every chance you get.
Secondly, if you are a beginner, get a tutor that knows how to teach the language. Trust me on the fact that natives may know the language, but they are not trained to teach it to you. This might sound strange but a westerner who actively speaks the language would probably be your best bet, just because they had to learn too and can teach it to you from a westerners perspective. Listen to a sounds and tones tape every day. And buy ‘Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar’. This is the best book I have seen for improving Chinese speaking NOW.
It can be very difficult and discouraging at first, trust me. People will try to switch the conversation to English. Some might get annoyed. They will say a lot of things that you don’t understand. But what you have to do is try to ask them what they are saying. Write down things you hear and don’t know, and then look them up or ask another native that speaks English. Read principles in the grammar book and then listen for them on the streets or in your conversations with people. After a few months, it gets easier and easier. Its the initial stages that are hard to get past. If you have a tutor, have him or her come with you to go and talk to people you don’t know. A tutor is someone you already know. New people don’t know your strengths and weaknesses and will speak to you in an unbiased way.
As far as reading, the best way to learn how to read is to read more. Again, you have to start with a tutor in order to kind of understand the basics of character learning. However, starting from a basic Chinese college text can teach you how to start reading characters. It comes with time and alot of patience.
This is the best advice that I have and I promise that it works. Good luck to all of you Cantonese speakers out there!
July 13th, 2011 at 8:04 am
Hi Emily,
It was nice reading your story. Do you mind me asking you what religious mission you served? It seems that there are lots of missionaries in Hong Kong. I myself have already been approached by an evangelical missionary in the subway at Causeway Bay once.
By the way, have you ever thought about recording a youtube video? It’s always great to see westerners speaking Cantonese fluently!
Cheers,
Marcelo
September 14th, 2011 at 4:48 am
You’re sending people to learn about Krashen and Comprehensible Input (which is a good thing), but your recommendations don’t reflect what those theories say about how language is acquired.
If you’re interested in producing some truly CI-based audio materials for people to use to learn Cantonese, I’ll be happy to train you in how to do that. I train Mandarin teachers in the use of CI-based methodology (primarily TPRS) for language teaching. There is an enormous need for this kind of material, since clearly traditional methods of teaching Chinese produce a huge pool of floundering eternal novices and a small number of fluent speakers. With language a universal human ability, that just doesn’t make sense.