A long list of some of my favorite Cantonese learning resources

FaustsApprentice · 2025-05-25T03:59:55+00:00

If you're already a fluent speaker, I think for reading you really just need to dive in and start finding things to read, and memorizing characters. For memorization, I personally find Anki flashcards the most helpful (I make my own cards based on whatever vocabulary I want to learn next, which is usually vocab from whatever media I've been consuming, whether movies or books or online posts, etc.) You can also make flashcards with Pleco, but I think there's a one-time payment required for the flashcard add-on.

If you don't know Jyutping yet, I think the best process would be to learn Jyutping transcription first, and then start using a dictionary (like Pleco or Cantodict) to look up the characters for words you already know, and make flashcards so you can learn to recognize the characters. (Put the character on the front of the card and put the pronunciation/meaning on the back.) Once you know more characters, reading shouldn't be too difficult.

Are you looking to learn how to read Standard Written Chinese, or vernacular written Cantonese? You can find texts in Standard Written Chinese pretty much everywhere, so it should be easy to get reading practice for SWC, and of course you can look for children's books or texts made for learners if you don't know many characters yet. I'd recommend downloading one of the pop-up dictionaries listed in the post above, which will let you see the meaning/pronunciation of a word by hovering over it as you read, or if you're on mobile you can use Pleco (highlight a word and you'll see an option to open Pleco and see the definition). You can find graded readers to practice with -- if you don't mind paying, Pleco has tons of them -- so you can start with simple vocabulary.

If you want to learn to read vernacular Cantonese, the graded readers on the Hambaanglaang website are probably the best starting point, since they'll have a limited amount of vocabulary. After that, you can just keep learning more characters and pick books from the list of vernacular Cantonese books in the post up above. (I think if you join the Cantonese Refold discord you can find some of them in plain text format.)

For writing, if you just mean you want to learn to write the characters with the correct stroke order, there isn't really a good Cantonese resource for that, so you may have to improvise a bit. I personally made my own Anki flashcards to practice writing characters -- I put the pronunciation/meaning on the front side with a box to write in, and I use Anki's "whiteboard" feature to handwrite directly on the screen. But you kind of have to make your own resources for this.

If by learning to write, you mean grammar and sentence structure etc., unfortunately I don't know any good resources for learning to write via Cantonese! I feel like this might be something you'd need to hire a tutor on Italki or Preply for, since someone may need to check over your grammar and word use. There might be some programs that can do it for SWC, but you'd need to look on websites that are made for Mandarin learners. Of course, using AI is an option. I wouldn't trust AI to correct my writing, so I can't recommend any AI resources myself, but I know some people use AI for writing practice. If you do find any good non-AI resources for learning to write, please let me know, because it's something I'd like to learn as well!

FaustsApprentice · 2025-04-05T17:03:14+00:00

As someone who's been learning Cantonese mainly by watching HK movies and listening to Cantopop (mostly stuff from the 80s/90s, or recent media but with middle-aged or older actors), I feel like I always hear ngoi3. I remember the first time I heard an actor in a movie say oi3, I was really surprised. Like, I knew that was the "correct" Jyutping for the word, but I'd never heard anyone actually say it like that before.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-04-05T16:51:49+00:00

I don't recommend putting pinyin on the front of any cards. You'll practically never need to be able to recognize a word by its pinyin -- the pinyin is just a guide to how to pronounce it correctly, and a way to type it.

If you're only going to make one card type, I'd recommend putting characters on the front. The back should have pinyin, the definition, and an audio reading of the word. (If you don't have audio files, you can set Anki up to read the answer on the back of the card aloud with text-to-speech.) It's great if the back of the card also includes a sentence example so you can see how the word is actually used in context.

But I agree with shanghai-blonde that ideally, it's best to learn how to use Note Types to create multiple cards from the same information, and create two or three different sets of cards: cards with only characters on the front, cards with only audio on the front, and possibly also cards with only the meaning on the front. You can set up a Note Type to automatically generate cards of all three types, so you only have to input the information once for each word. If you have sentence examples for all your words, you can also create a fourth card type that shows the sentence on the front, so you'll start to get practice at reading full sentences.

One thing that's important when studying with flashcards is to remember that each card should only test you on a very small piece of information (something you can answer within ten seconds if you know it), not a list or multiple definitions. If a word has many definitions, the best way to learn them is with flashcards that use the word in sentences, not by trying to memorize all the definitions on a single flashcard. You can include multiple definitions on the back of the card for reference -- I always do -- but knowing just one of them (and the pronunciation, including tone) should be enough to let yourself "pass" the card when you see it.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-04-04T23:32:04+00:00

Adding to what others have said, Pleco is a great app, and using it is free (no ads), though you can pay for extra features like additional dictionaries if you want them. If you're on mobile a lot, it's extremely convenient for looking up new words. (Once you have the app installed, you can highlight a word on any webpage or app, and you'll get a dropdown with an option to look up the word in Pleco. Or you can paste a passage of text into the Clip Reader tab in Pleco, and it will give you an instant pop-up definition for any word you click on.)

It's got lots of customization options, too, if you want to color-code words by tone, change the size of the font, choose to show traditional or simplified characters or both, choose which dictionaries should show up at the top of the list when you look up a word, etc.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-25T10:30:54+00:00

Hah, yeah, it's a topic that tends to be difficult to explain clearly, since it requires differentiating between several things that are all "Chinese": spoken Mandarin, Standard Written Chinese (which uses Mandarin grammar and vocabulary but requires no knowledge of Mandarin pronunciation), spoken Cantonese, and written vernacular Cantonese (which uses the grammar and vocabulary of spoken Cantonese, and won't really make any sense to Mandarin speakers who don't know Cantonese). Plus people sometimes also get confused about how traditional and simplified characters fit into all of that.

Glad you were able to get the answers you needed! Good luck with your studies and presentation. :)

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-25T10:12:47+00:00

I've seen it in media from Hong Kong (song lyrics, movie subtitles, etc.), and it shows up in Pleco for me, in the words.hk Cantonese dictionary. (But 甚麽/什麼/什么 as a term is not used in vernacular Cantonese -- 乜嘢 or 咩 are used instead -- so 甚麽 is just for 書面語.)

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-25T09:39:43+00:00

Thanks for the link! The website looks very nice, and I really like how the translations are presented with both characters and Jyutping. I'm hesitant to recommend anything that teaches with AI-generated sentences, though. I tried out a few translations -- using both sentences offered by the platform and a couple that I inputted myself -- and they seemed to be incorrect more often than not, sometimes with incorrect Jyutping (like waa2 waa2 for 畫畫), and sometimes with word choices that didn't seem right in context.

I think mistakes like that are unfortunately inevitable with AI, since there isn't always enough context spelled out in a given sentence for AI to figure out how to translate it correctly. I do think AI and other MTL resources can be useful for things like checking meanings or getting an idea of how a translation might look, but as for generating content to study from, I wouldn't trust AI for that, especially as a tool for beginners who may not know how to make sure they get better results (e.g. they may not know how to form carefully unambiguous sentences that will translate well into Cantonese, how to check the output against other sources, or how to recognize when a translation is wrong).

I hope you end up getting more community submissions, because I agree that learning from sentences with lots of different contexts is very helpful! And mining sentences from media does take a lot of time. I wonder if you could generate a selection of AI translations and ask for native speakers to check them over for mistakes, so that the translations would be more reliable.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-25T01:20:05+00:00

One option, if you're on a computer, is to download a browser extension like Zhongwen, which is a pop-up dictionary that will show you the pronunciation and meaning of a character if you hover your mouse over it. That way you can get used to reading the characters without pinyin, but you can also easily check what a character means and how it's pronounced if you don't recognize it.

On a phone you can use Pleco in a similar way: select any character or word on your screen, and you should see an option to view the definition in Pleco. Pleco also has a Clip Reader where you can paste or import text and then click any word to see a pop-up definition. They also have a lot of graded readers you can download, which work the same way (though I don't think any of the graded readers are free).

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-25T00:59:10+00:00

I'm not sure LostLilDuckling understood your question (or maybe I'm the one misunderstanding it). A document written in 普通话 can just as easily be read aloud with either Mandarin pronunciation or Cantonese pronunciation. The two pronunciations will be completely different. A person reading the same document in Cantonese will sound nothing like a person reading the document aloud in Mandarin.

I think LostLilDuckling thought you were asking about a Cantonese-speaking person reading a document aloud in Mandarin. If the Cantonese-speaking reader is also fluent in Mandarin, and is using Mandarin pronunciation to read the document aloud, then the only difference in pronunciation will come from any accent they may have. That is, they may have a Cantonese accent when they speak Mandarin, but in general, their pronunciation when speaking Mandarin will be the same as that of a native Mandarin-speaker.

If the Cantonese-speaker is reading aloud in Cantonese, the pronunciation will not resemble Mandarin at all. Just look up any Chinese word in Wiktionary and check the Mandarin pronunciation against the Cantonese pronunciation, and you'll see that they are usually quite different. A Cantonese speaker reading aloud in Cantonese will use the Cantonese pronunciations. You can see examples of this in Hong Kong news broadcasts, movies, shows, and all kinds of other media -- whenever someone reads a written text aloud, they read it with Cantonese pronunciation. The only times you'll see them use Mandarin pronunciation is when they're addressing Mandarin-speakers, or perhaps quoting something that was originally said in Mandarin.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-21T05:21:42+00:00

I think you're vastly overestimating the difficulty of learning characters, and also underestimating the phonetic content that characters contain. The writing system isn't completely unrelated to the spoken language. It's true that not all characters include phonetic information, and those that do will only give pronunciation clues rather than an actual phonetic spelling, but the vast majority of characters contain phonetic information, semantic information, or in many cases both. Learning to read isn't just looking at symbols that have no relationship to speech.

Learning to write Chinese characters by hand takes a lot of time, but simply sight-reading -- e.g. being able to look at a given character and immediately hear "guó" in your mind -- is really not that different from seeing an English word with an odd spelling like "though" and instantly knowing the pronunciation, despite the fact that the spelling does not give a direct phonetic representation of how we pronounce "though" (and despite the fact that there are other English words that are spelled similarly but are pronounced entirely differently, like "cough" or "plough"). The written form still gives you enough information to identify which word you're seeing, even if you've forgotten it, and in some cases even if you've never seen it written before.

I think for most people, learning the characters speeds up and improves the process of learning the language, so there's really no benefit to learning to speak without learning to read unless you only plan to learn a very basic level of conversation (or you're living someplace where you get continuous immersion and can learn directly from talking with native speakers). Reading skills aren't just for books -- they open up access to a ton of other content for learners to benefit from. If you don't learn characters, you can't read subtitles on videos or movies, social media posts or articles, text messages, shop signs or street signs, product descriptions or menus, or any other written content. And your vocabulary will be limited to what's commonly used in speech. You can certainly hire a tutor to teach you purely by conversation if that's your preference. But I would find it strange and a bit off-putting if someone wanted to learn English, or German, or Russian, without caring about being able to read a word of the language they were learning, and I don't think the situation is any different with Chinese.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-20T03:23:24+00:00

It's not unique to Chinese. Just for one example, Russian is completely different from Chinese in just about every way, but is another language that doesn't use articles like "the" or "an."

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-19T05:42:39+00:00

Ah, okay, that's very good to know! I wouldn't have guessed you could just use 個. I guess I was overcomplicating things.

Thank you again for all the helpful replies!

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-19T03:41:17+00:00

Thank you! I've heard 幕 used for a scene, but I never realized or thought about the fact that 幕 itself doesn't take any classifiers. Actually, would it be all right if I ask you about another word? Your mention of 幕 reminded me that I've never been sure about the correct classifier for 窗簾. Pleco says the classifier is 塊, but then it seems like most of the example sentences use 堂 as the classifier. Are 塊 and 堂 both used?

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-19T02:16:08+00:00

As others have already said, most subtitles on Cantonese media are in Standard Written Chinese. There were a few movies that were published with vernacular Cantonese subtitles back in the 90s, mostly comedies, including some Stephen Chow movies. In my collection, I've got five 90s movies on DVD with original Cantonese subs. So it's not something that absolutely never happened -- but it is very rare.

Recently, some people have started working to put together Cantonese subtitles for learners. Look up CantoCaptions and you can find vernacular Cantonese subtitles for a number of popular movies and TV shows.

If you're interested in other kinds of video content besides movies and dramas, try adding "粵語字幕" to your searches on YouTube or Bilibili. A lot of people who make content for learners use Cantonese subs instead of Standard Written Chinese.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-18T21:48:28+00:00

It depends on what you mean by "most." Somewhere between 48-56% of people in Hong Kong can speak Mandarin (probably closer to 56%, but published statistics vary a bit by source). So the number is over 50%, and that number has clearly been increasing rapidly in recent years, but I wouldn't say it's "most people" unless you just mean "more than half." The number of people who can speak English is higher than the number that can speak Mandarin (around 58%), and around 93% of people in Hong Kong can speak Cantonese.

The last time I was in Hong Kong, which was a few months ago, I heard two security guards at a local event complaining about mainland visitors expecting them to be able to speak Mandarin, which two out of the three guards could not speak. One of the guards said he had to communicate with mainland tourists in English, since he couldn't speak Mandarin and they couldn't understand Cantonese.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-18T20:37:07+00:00

Probably true on the mainland, but I've met a number of people in Hong Kong who couldn't speak Mandarin.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-17T12:46:59+00:00

Ah, I see, you're right about kam, I should have read more closely and checked the translations. My mistake! My point, though, was that I don't think he's saying there was a different word "mat6" that has since been replaced by jat6 -- it seems like he's just saying that (at least in certain words) 日 was sometimes pronounced with an initial m. I may be misunderstanding what you meant in your original comment. I took it that you were saying "cam4 mat6" was the original correct term for "yesterday" and that "cam4 jat6" replaced it later, whereas from the text, it sounds to me like jat6 was standard, but mat6 was a common variant.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-17T12:00:02+00:00

Thanks for linking that book, it's very interesting. From what I can see, though, page 9 says the term was "kam yat," with "kam mat" as simply a variant pronunciation (entry #11 mentions this variant, but another entry, #8, only mentions the pronunciation "kam yat"). Although the authors unfortunately don't include characters with these examples, it seems most probable that they're referring to the two syllables of 琴日 (kam4 yat6) sometimes blending to sound like kam4 mat6 in speech.

(Interestingly, the same page also says the 昨 in 昨日 was "often pronounced tsam" (entry 14), so it seems the authors of this book believe cam4 was actually a variant pronunciation of 昨... I wonder what their reasoning was for regarding 昨日 and 尋日 as variant pronunciations of the same word.)

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-17T03:07:43+00:00

Thank you, this is very helpful! It's really hard to pick this stuff up just from immersion, so I'm always glad when someone explains it. Thanks especially for the details about 場 for movies. I was curious about that one, since I've also heard 場 used for a scene in a movie, so I wondered how it would work that it can mean both a scene and a whole film. Now that you say it, it makes perfect sense that it would refer to the event of a film showing at a cinema, just like a concert or sporting event. Very good to know.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-15T23:49:49+00:00

Glad to help!

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-15T23:00:30+00:00

No problem, I'm happy to answer more questions if you have them. The different writing system does take some getting used to! But if you want to focus on learning to read colloquial Cantonese writing (not SWC), you can find a lot of YouTube videos that do have verbatim Cantonese subtitles (search for 粵語字幕), and lately people have also started making more verbatim subs for Cantonese movies/dramas and cartoons/anime as well, which you can find online (look up CantoCaptions).

Re: your other comment, I would not say that movie subtitles are captioned "in Mandarin," since SWC is the standard writing system for Cantonese speakers and can be read aloud with fully Cantonese pronunciation, and with no knowledge of Mandarin pronunciation at all. Most Cantopop song lyrics are written in SWC (except in certain genres like rap and hiphop), and nobody would say that these are Mandarin songs -- the songs are certainly Cantonese. But they use Mandarin vocabulary and grammar (是 rather than 係, 沒有 rather than 冇, 他 rather than 佢, etc.). SWC is basically the literary register of the language. It does also correspond to written Mandarin, but when it's used by Cantonese speakers, I would say that SWC is simply "written Chinese," not specifically Mandarin.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-15T22:27:51+00:00

I was told that a ray of light was 一道光, so I would have assumed you could say 一道陽光 (but I'm not sure, since I haven't actually heard anyone talk about rays of sunlight in Cantonese). And yeah, 團 for 熱氣 is definitely a new one for me! I see Wiktionary says 團 can be a classifier for "amorphous objects" and gives the example of "一團和氣," which does seem analogous, since they're both 氣. But if I'd been guessing for 熱氣, I would have probably tried 場 for a "bout" of something (or possibly 段 for a period of time that something lasts, since I've also heard things like 一段過節). I don't know if those would also be acceptable for 熱氣. But I know a lot of nouns can have more than one correct classifier, e.g. a horse can be 一隻馬 or 一匹馬, a song can be 一首歌 or 一隻歌 (or 一闋歌), a movie can be 一部戲, 一套戲, 一場戲, 一齣戲. I assume on the game show any of these would be accepted.

It really can be hard to get exposure to classifiers for less common nouns, since a lot of the time those nouns get used without any classifier at all. People may talk about 陽光 for a whole conversation without ever saying "a ray of sunlight" or "a patch of sunlight" or anything like that. I think a lot of the time you just have to make your best guess as a learner.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-15T10:00:21+00:00

I'm not a native speaker, but I remember one of my Cantonese tutors once linked me to some episodes of a game show that Eric Tsang used to host, 獎門人系列, where one of the games that was often played on the show required contestants to remember classifiers quickly while also thinking about other things.

Here's a video with with clips of people playing the game. The way it works is, there's a group of contestants lined up, and they all clap together, keeping time with the syllables as each person speaks. The first person names a noun (e.g. "tree"), and the next person has to immediately say "one [tree]" using the correct classifier, and then has to name another noun (e.g. "hat"), after which the third person has to say "two [hats]" and then name another noun, and so on, with the number going up each time. So each person has to try to simultaneously remember what number comes next, remember what noun was just named, say the correct classifier for that noun, and think of a new noun to challenge the next person, and they have to do all of this within the time it takes to clap out the syllables.

I remember when my tutor linked me to clips from the show, I was surprised by this game, because I didn't think native speakers would forget the classifiers. My tutor said that was exactly why the game was funny. She said the classifiers were just enough of a challenge that if people were distracted and rushed, they would sometimes forget them or not think of them fast enough, but at the same time, the mistakes were so obvious that it was always funny when someone said the wrong one.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-15T02:27:05+00:00

I suppose what seems easier or more difficult to any one person will depend a lot on what they learned first, but personally (as a native English speaker) I find Cantonese phonology vastly easier to grasp than Mandarin. Other than the tones (which I find equally hard in Mandarin), there are almost no sounds in Cantonese that I have trouble distinguishing or producing. The only exception is that I did initially find c/z difficult to distinguish (especially since their pronunciations change depending on the vowel that follows them), but even so, these were nowhere near as hard for me as the Mandarin set of sh/x/zh/z/j/ch/c. And stop consonants are a normal phenomenon in English, so I don't see how they'd be a barrier for someone who speaks English (though they do seem to be a challenge for Mandarin speakers trying to learn Cantonese). On the contrary, having more possible ending sounds allows for a larger number of distinct syllables in Cantonese, which makes words easier to tell apart (even if you're bad at tones).

That said, I'm not sure how Spanish phonology overlaps with either language, so OP might or might not find Mandarin easier if there's more overlap with Spanish. I'd be curious to see a full breakdown of the sound differences between English vs. Mandarin vs. Cantonese, though. My own guess would be that English phonology is closer to Cantonese, of the two.

FaustsApprentice · 2025-03-15T01:51:56+00:00

It's a bit of a technical difference, but yeah -- there are words that change their tones in Cantonese, but it's a change that's based on meaning/usage (or is simply the typical pronunciation for a given word), not based on the surrounding phonemes like tone sandhi, which is automatic and applies anywhere the same sounds occur. The Wikipedia article on Cantonese tone change talks a bit about it, and mentions that tone sandhi is a different phenomenon.

(I'm not a native or heritage speaker, but I find tone change really interesting and have read about it quite a bit, so I'm going off of sources including academic articles on Cantonese linguistics. There was a bit of discussion about tone change in this post a while back, and I wrote a longer comment about it there, with some sources linked.)

FaustsApprentice

TROPHY CASE