After reading many Japanese books, my mind feels relaxed and comfortable with Chinese characters. If I see a sentence written in Chinese characters right next to a romanization, such as Jyutping, my eyes are drawn to the familiar characters, instead of the less familiar combinations of letters and numbers.
The character leaves an impression in my mind, and I can remember a sentence more easily when visualizing the characters. The characters almost work as more of a memory aid for a learner coming from Japanese. However, it seems that when coming directly from English the opposite is true.
I have seen it recommended to ignore the characters in the beginning until solid speaking skills have been established. Instead of being helpful the Chinese characters are another aspect of the language that seems esoteric and needs to be slowly broken down into something familiar.
I think this difference allows a Japanese learner to have an entirely different mindset and level of comfort with the language at the beginning stages.
I had taken two Mandarin classes in college and remembered that I never really grasped the tones. This time I wanted to start off on the right foot, so I started by trying to learn the tones. Youtube was a great resource for this. The video I found most helpful was from Sophie Yang. It turns out that learning the numbers from 0 to 10 is enough to cover all the tones, and method resonated with me.
What I found helpful, to allow me to hear the sounds, was downloading the Pleco Chinese dictionary iOS app and getting the flashcard add-on. I loaded a lot of words from a pre-existing deck and set the audio to Cantonese. I listened to each word and tried to identify the tones. I stayed at this stage for a month or two and now, at least conceptually, understand the tones.
For the next stage in learning, I wanted to listen to lots of understandable input and attempt to shadow it. I started by downloading Youtube videos where I could extract known Cantonese sentences then edit them in Audacity to remove any English and make each phrase repeat six times. Unfortunately there are only three videos in this series. I would need closer to one thousand! I found out that it took quite some time to edit the audio into an appropriate format to drill the sentences.
Time being a very important consideration for me, I needed someone to do that labor for me. I found an almost ideal solution in a language learning platform called Glossika. I started with the free trial and grew into a routine of listening for an hour or so a day when my ears were free.
AI Tutor Matching Tell us your needs and we will match you with 3 ideal tutors in 30 seconds! Your Cantonese Teacher Chloe. Native in Cantonese. Business communication. Teacher Amelie -Teaching Cantonese and Chinese. Pronunciation Conversational. Basic to high-level Cantonese. Outstanding Tutors Select your tutors around the globe.
Customised Courses Based on your specific learning needs. Pay per Lesson No need to prepay a lot of money to start. Flexible Schedule Book classes based on your own schedule. How to use AmazingTalker. Select tutors Browse tutor profiles for the language you want to learn. Book a lesson Select a time slot when you want to take a lesson. Attend your lesson online You can attend your lesson through Zoom on your desktop or mobile device.
Change your tutor at no extra cost or receive AT credits instead. See more. How much do Cantonese sessions cost in Japan? How do I find the best Cantonese tutor in Japan? Can I find high-quality Cantonese tutors at reasonable prices? Who are our Cantonese tutors? This may explain why most students of Chinese language opt for Mandarin, as it opens up more opportunities.
As a result, there are also more courses and materials available for learning to speak Mandarin Chinese. Give some careful thought to your reasons for learning Chinese before you make your decision, but keep in mind that you can always switch, if you choose.
No matter what you decide, keep reading the posts on Learn Mandarin Now for more ways to learn Chinese and to find others you can talk to for advice. We're always here to help! Get 3 months Audible membership for just 99p. If you need to type in many different languages, the Q International Keyboard can help. It enables you to type almost any language that uses the Latin, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets, and is free.
If you like this site and find it useful, you can support it by making a donation via PayPal or Patreon , or by contributing in other ways. Omniglot is how I make my living. Note : all links on this site to Amazon. At that time, I accepted the arguments about practicality and about the better standardization of Mandarin and of Mandarin study materials.
I started in Mandarin with the most perfectly-spoken materials I could find and I continued with these until I felt I had to switch to native materials. I tried to do that but very quickly became annoyed by the prevailing native enunciation the speaking without moving the lips or opening the mouth.
I'm sorry, but that causes me to feel like it's, I'll say, less open. In Cantonese now, I am happy struggling to match what sounds and feels like openness about the information being shared and about the feelings of the speaker. These are just feelings, man, but they're important to me. But lastly, I must warn you that you should probably have a much weightier reason to start with either of these - a family member or loved one, yes; a vague goal of future employment, maybe.
But it'll take a chunk of your life, you know. Querido, I agree that yes, cantonese is probably mostly worth it IF I had a loved one who spoke it and I wanted the communicate with them.
Though I do honestly disagree with you needing to have a weighted, heavy reason beyond pure interest or career interest. There are countless people who have learned Japanese for example and have no real connection to friends or family that spoke it. They simply wanted to learn it and immerse themselves in a new culture or loved Japanese pop culture.
I'm coming at mandarin out of the reason to understand the, or at least a significant part of the Chinese culture beyond what average American's know. I have gone to Chinese restaurants my whole life, it was a simply fun thing to do. I have watched numerous Chinese films and now I want to get beyond the surface level and really get an idea as best I can to understanding the people and culture through learning the language.
Perhaps, that would be considered a deeper reason to want to learn it though. Learn what you prefer. You can also learn both. It won't be the easiest thing on earth, but I guess you already know this.
There are more resources for learning Mandarin, but you can surely learn Cantonese. Cantonese uses traditional characters and has a different pronunciation. You may simply focus on Cantonese or learn Mandarin or the Chinese spoken in Taiwan that uses simplified characters and then expand your study to Cantonese. I've been studying Mandarin all the time and I'm at intermediate level and I'll never finish learning new things.
I also didn't learn traditional characters but it's something I'd like to do in the future and if I wanted to learn spoken Cantonese fast I'd surely use Glossika as one of my resources already downloaded it, ready to use it when I want :P. There are also some books, but I didn't really started learning myself so I can't suggest you any at this time. Maybe someone who is studying Cantonese already can help you in that regard. Anyway coming back to the main topic of your post, if you just study for the love of studying a new language and getting closer to a culture you like, just choose the one you prefer.
If you like Cantonese although more people speak Mandarin there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Just go for it. If one plans eventually to learn both, my experience is that it is easier to go from Cantonese to Mandarin. It's easier to drop the final stops to approximate Mandarin than to learn where the "new" Cantonese ones should go. Further to above, knowing the final stops is also helpful for learning Japanese pronunciations. You can post now and select your username and password later.
If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account. Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible. Paste as plain text instead. Only 75 emoji are allowed. Display as a link instead.
0コメント