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FONETIC CANTONESE provides:

  • words and phrases in sequence to quicken your ease of use i.e. arrival information is first then lost baggage, trolleys, followed by taxi talk, turn left/right, straight, stop, then money phrases and so on.
  • pictorial tone indicators to make pronunciation easier.
  • an interesting brief history on Hong Kong.

Guide to Pronunciation.

Cantonese is a completely tonal language, having 9 different tones (Mandarin has 4) making Cantonese quite difficult to master. Academics will further define that Cantonese actually has 6 distinct tones with 3 subset tones but the tonal differences are so incredibly subtle it would take months to master them so in this book we make do with only 6.

Interestingly, although many Cantonese words can be represented in the form of characters many of them, including colloquial words, have no written form at all. Some linguists are now working to create new characters to enable these sounds to be written.

Also interesting is that Chinese people from provinces (other than Southern China where Cantonese is spoken) are able to read some of the characters but in fact are not able to understand them because in many cases the same combination of character's means something completely different to what they are used to reading.

Remembering subtlety of tones we have created 6 of our own pictorial tone marks that not only show direction of tone but are also physically placed high, middle or low depending on how the tone should be spoken.

Click here to view a sample from the book.

 

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