Learning cantonese how long

You will see what I discovered in this post and hopefully you will be able to apply their lessons learned into your own Cantonese learning journey. Why learn Cantonese if Cantonese is only spoken in Hong Kong which equates to about 8 million people? Yes, you can read the subtitles but a ton of meaning gets lost in translation and who likes reading those tiny subtitles anyway? While there are some similarities between Cantonese and Mandarin, there is a huge difference in words, pronunciation and grammar, particularly in the placement of verbs.

Depending on who you ask, some may say they are distinct enough to be separated into two different languages, instead of just dialects. Just because you can speak and understand Cantonese does not mean you can speak and understand Mandarin and vice versa. Mandarin is spoken exactly the same way as it is written, while Cantonese is not spoken in the same way at all.

There are plenty of words in Cantonese that are different in Mandarin. Here is a video with example words and a bit of Cantonese history. Although some languages are easier to learn depending on which languages you already know fluently, there is one factor that always makes a language more difficult than it actually is.

That is: other discouraging learners. Instead of looking at whether or not a language is difficult, focus on why you want to learn the language, how you will use the language, and what learning this language means to you. Are you willing to do what it takes to learn it? Once you are clear on the why and what learning this language means to you, then you can start learning. If you consistently work on it, the only way you can fail is if you quit. It will give you a leg up if you choose to take Cantonese on!

At the time when I contacted Carlos, he had just moved to Hong Kong for good and I was about to fly there. It was perfect synchronicity. We set up an interview on how he learned to speak Cantonese like a champ.

Carlos said it is tempting to want to learn to read and write Chinese but he would rather be really great at speaking only, than to be average in speaking, reading and writing.

If you are great at speaking Cantonese only, you are able to not only wow the locals every time you open your mouth, you can also communicate with the natives more effectively. Some differences exist, but users of either adopt the other easily. For official purposes, however, only standard written Chinese or English is used.

Written Chinese and spoken Cantonese are different. There are words that are used only in written Chinese, some that are used only in spoken Cantonese, and those that can be used in either. Cantonese is rarely written down, and it is therefore more difficult to learn Cantonese specific words. Particles are usually made up of one, two or three characters. Shall we eat? Do you want to eat or not? Are you going to eat or not? My advice for beginners is simply to ignore particles except maybe the first few essential ones.

Characters still represent one of the most difficult tasks for a foreign learner. This simplifies the task a lot. Guessing the pronunciation of a Chinese character is actually possible in some cases. You can never know for sure, but you can generate a good guess. Look at the following chemical elements and their corresponding characters:.

The correct pronunciations are:. We just based the reading off the wrong character. This is an excellent video that talks about how the sound system for Chinese characters work. Take a look here. The awesome team behind the dictionary built on those principles:. A Chinese character is the smallest unit of the Chinese language that contains meaning. The Hong Kong government also assess the Chinese proficiency of candidates who wish to enter civil service for certain posts, and among certain candidates , but it seems only to test written Chinese, and is relatively difficult for foreigners.

Specifically, it depends on the following and maybe more factors :. The official answer given by the FSI Foreign Service Institute is that for English speakers, it involves roughly hours in 88 weeks a little over 1.

But, that estimate is based on how much time it takes to get to a relatively high level. This really depends on what level you want to take your Cantonese to. For the purposes of this guide, I assume you want to communicate with others in Cantonese. So if you want to communicate and speak only, then yes, you can speak Cantonese and speak it really well without ever needing to know how to read or write.

Learning vocabulary at the higher levels is tough without knowing the script. So the short answer is yes up till a strong intermediate, communicative level , but no if you want an all rounded, higher level proficiency.

Difficulty is relative, and it mainly depends on what your native languages are. Take Japanese, for example. The reason is because it has many wonderful learning resources for learning Japanese.

Cantonese suffers from not having enough learning materials for foreigners. That is the main difficulty in learning Cantonese. Even Mandarin, its close cousin, is easier than Cantonese just because it has thousands if not more of organizations, and countless Mandarin teachers around the world to bridge that gap. More importantly, Mandarin is standardized. Standardized romanization, consistency between the written and spoken word, and consistent across China.

Cantonese has never been standardized — its growth and usage has mainly been dependent on the socioeconomic climate of Hong Kong and Macau.

This is, in part, what Cantolounge is for. The main activity that falls under the first category is speaking. While you can study new words and Cantonese structures on your own, reciting a monologue is a very different experience than having a two way dialogue though monologues, surprisingly, are helpful in learning. So when you feel like speaking, yes, you should definitely consider taking conversation classes with a native Cantonese teacher. Quite frankly, I have no idea.

Move on to another language, or do something else you like. Give it a test drive and see how it feels. Actually there could be. Again, just based on my personal experience, I recommend against doing language exchanges because of the fickle nature of these sessions. This is actually another interesting question I saw. I can attest to that — when I was younger, I was taught pinyin in primary school in our Mandarin classes, but it was only until when I started teaching Cantonese around 15 years later that I learnt Jyutping.

So no, Cantonese is passed on orally from generation to generation and in schools. Most systems agree that there are pretty much six distinctive tones.

The seven tones system is generally used in the Yale system. This system splits tone 1 into two separate tones — high level, and high falling. The nine tones system is an extension of the six tones system, and generally the three extra tones are just repeats of the previous ones.

To be precise, tones 7, 8, and 9 correspond respectively to tones 1, 3 and 6 in terms of pitch. The extra three tones must end in p, t or k — words that are end in these letters sound shorter.

For folks who want to learn more, you can read this paper on six tones vs. Cantonese tones six tones nine tones. As long as there are communities of people that speak it and their children continue to speak it , a language is unlikely to die out.

This is also roughly the number of Korean speakers, which has around 77 million speakers around the world. Have you ever heard anyone say that Korean is dying? In Hong Kong, due to the growing importance of Mandarin, there are now schools that are making the switch to teaching official subjects in Mandarin, while reserving Cantonese usage to a small number of classes. Not all schools do this, but the landscape of the official languages used in Hong Kong in the foreseeable future remains unsure.

In areas outside of Hong Kong, Cantonese is also decreasing in usage. From citizens of the previous generations, and also Chinese citizens proud of our Cantonese heritage, passing on the language is a no-brainer. The surrounding folks in the restaurant broke into applause. The next largest group of Cantonese speakers belong to the overseas Chinese communities. Whether Cantonese is dying in these enclaves is difficult to tell. On the one hand, most parents want their children to grow up speaking the local language fluently, like a native.

Others might refer back to their dreams of moving abroad and adopting a Western lifestyle when they eventually make the move, and the decision to discontinue the use of Cantonese is an extension of that desire.

Cantonese is also a unique Chinese language in the sense that it remains the few Chinese languages that is used for official purposes. Trials in court, interrogation of suspects at the police station, news broadcasting, not to mention the Hong Kong film industry and the Cantopop music industry — this is living proof that Cantonese is still in widespread use in Hong Kong and Macau, and possibly beyond our borders.

However, it should come as no surprise to anyone that if my understanding is correct the Chinese government wishes for linguistic homogeneity. In other words, they want to promote the use of Mandarin as much as possible, for informal and official purposes.

And how will businesses communicate across provinces? This, of course, will have an impact on the many varieties of Chinese languages, among which Cantonese is one. However, this might change entirely If Hong Kong and Macau had to replace our official languages from English, Cantonese, Mandarin and Portuguese to just Mandarin — that will be the turning point for Cantonese — and somewhere down the road, it would surely die out.

One possible time for that to happen would be , and respectively for Hong Kong and Macau, 50 years since the handover of these two regions from Britain and Portugal. But it is also possible that tensions between Hong Kong and China will have cooled at that time, leaving for more room for maneuver when discussing the future landscape of the region, including its language policy. While this was developed in Europe, I feel that the descriptors are widely applicable to any language in the world.

There are six levels of proficiency ranging from A1 basic user — C2 proficient user , and the following document taken from the Council of Europe itself describes these levels across the four skills listening, reading, speaking and writing in gruelling detail:. CUHK Cantonese level descriptions. However, this is just conjecture, but I think that while there are much fewer people learning Cantonese, the people who are learning Cantonese usually have much stronger reasons for doing so, and so they tend to stick around much longer, and are in it for good.

This question is undoubtedly inspired by the success of Duolingo in popularizing language learning. I remember learning my Spanish fundamentals through Duolingo, and because I was just doing it for the fun of it, I took about five months to finish the entire course. But in spite of that, I felt that it was a very cool presentation of the language and I thoroughly enjoyed learning with it. You have to supplement your learning with a lot of pronunciation practice, dialogue study, listening exposure, suitable speaking practice, and so forth.

This is another question I often see popping up among learners, so I thought I might try to answer it here. I have to say that the best way to learn Cantonese is whatever way you find to be the most fun. Here are a few examples of how to make learning Cantonese a bit more fun:. Talk about subjects that interest you. I know this sounds crazy simply, but I remember talking with a student recently, and he told me that he literally had a switch in his mind flip on when we started talking about stuff that interested him, instead of questions I prepared beforehand, which we were talking about before he asked if we could switch topics.

His flow, confidence and accuracy immediately increased. Watch something fun in Cantonese. Perhaps sketching techniques, or cooking, or tech. Watch some Cantonese cartoons! Cantonese labels. Feeling unproductive but still wanna learn? Try practise your Cantonese typing! If you have a dialogue text like Teach Yourself Cantonese, then you can start by practising typing those dialogues up in Google Docs or something. If you really love the language, and it could be due to a number of reasons, you will find that learning the language is enjoyable and fun.

Heck, you might even get to make a few Cantonese friends, and use the language more in your daily life. But forgetting that reason, or not pinpointing what it is in the first place can lead to frustrations, disappointments and even resentment towards learning the language. It takes maybe 10 — 15 minutes to write down why you would like to learn. Why are you learning Cantonese? Yale — Cantonese romanization systems 3. Grammar 4. Where is Cantonese spoken?

How different are Mandarin and Cantonese? What are the differences between written and spoken Cantonese? What are Cantonese particles? How can I guess the reading of a Chinese character?

Is there a proficiency exam like the HSK? How long will it take me to learn Cantonese? Is it possible to learn to speak Cantonese without knowing how to write it?

And if you're reading this in the future, sign up anyway — you'll get my E-Book on language learning technology for free! If you enjoyed this article, please share it on Facebook or Twitter. It really helps me out!

I answer them all on my Facebook page. Enter your email address below to get free access to my Japanese Vocab Power Pack and learn essential Japanese words and phrases quickly and naturally.

ALL levels! Enter your email address below to get free access to my German Vocab Power Pack and learn essential German words and phrases quickly and naturally. Enter your email address below to get free access to my Italian Vocab Power Pack and learn essential Italian words and phrases quickly and naturally.

Enter your email address below to get free access to my French Vocab Power Pack and learn essential French words and phrases quickly and naturally.

Enter your email address below to get free access to my Natural Portuguese Grammar Pack and learn to internalise Portuguese grammar quickly and naturally through stories. Enter your email address below to get free access to my Natural Russian Grammar Pack and learn to internalise Russian grammar quickly and naturally through stories. Enter your email address below to get free access to my Natural German Grammar Pack and learn to internalise German grammar quickly and naturally through stories.

Enter your email address below to get free access to my Natural French Grammar Pack and learn to internalise French grammar quickly and naturally through stories. Enter your email address below to get free access to my Natural Italian Grammar Pack and learn to internalise Italian grammar quickly and naturally through stories. What can we do better? If I could make something to help you right now, w hat would it be?

Enter your email address below to get free access to my Spanish Vocab Power Pack and learn essential Spanish words and phrases quickly and naturally.

Enter your email address below to get free access to my Natural Spanish Grammar Pack and learn to internalise Spanish grammar quickly and naturally through stories. How to generate a full-time income from home with your English… even with ZERO previous teaching experience. Thanks for the life-change!

Looking for world-class training material to help you make a breakthrough in your language learning? Skip to primary navigation Skip to main content Skip to primary sidebar Skip to footer Blog. It was kind of a crazy decision to make. It was, without a doubt, one of the busiest periods in my life. When I've learnt languages before, I've been in one of two situations: living in the country where the language is spoken living in another country, but able to make friends with groups of people who speak the language I'm learning Neither of those were going to happen this time.

This was my chance to test out this theory for myself. But the journey you're going to read about in this post began some years ago… Let's wind the clock back and start with my 1-month progress video… Learn Cantonese In 15 Minutes A Day Over the course of the last year, I rarely studied Cantonese for more than minutes a day.

The contents of my Sprints generally included the following, in no particular order: Reading or reviewing a chapter of my Complete Cantonese textbook Studying or reviewing a lesson from CantoneseClass Those are pretty much the only things I did for the whole year. How To Stay Motivated When Learning Cantonese It hasn't been easy to be in an isolated environment like this and learn Cantonese — a completely different language.

So how did I stay motivated to learn over the whole year? Here are some thoughts. I'm trying to be the kind of person who, once he decides to do something, will actually do it. Accepting that 15 minutes a day is enough, and trying to do too much, helps enormously. Removing distractions and using Sprints to focus on one main activity for a number of weeks, simplifies the whole process.

It makes it easier for you to get up off the sofa and just get started. It's only 15 minutes. Speaking regularly with people is massive. Meeting people albeit online keeps you accountable and helps you to feel a sense of progress, because you can feel yourself becoming better able to express yourself.

More recently, setting a few simple, daily 5-minute goals has been really helpful for me. That's nothing! Well… yes and no. It's not long, but two things happen when you work with goals in this way. Please don't underestimate them. Repetition is the mother of skill. So I sympathise.

It's amazing the tricks that the mind plays on you! Since I started doing that, my Cantonese has improved leaps and bounds. It goes really fast. What are my main takeaways from the last year? Here goes. Start speaking with people now. If you think you're not ready, start anyway. Method doesn't matter.

Showing up everyday and doing something is what matters. Done is better than perfect. There's no rush. Time will do the work for you.