Learn Cantonese/Mandarin Here

Archive for April, 2008

Want to learn the exact words for 1 to 10 in Cantonese? Come Here

You can actually come “Here to learn more of the basic useful Cantonese.

2-minute Mandarin Lesson One: Talking about food.

 Basic Mandarin Lesson One [1:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1702)

According to Shanghai Daily (2/11/2008) , HANYU Pinyin, the Chinese phonetic system, celebrated its 50th anniversary in Feb, 2008. About one billion Chinese have used it to learn Mandarin since the first edition of pinyin was issued in 1958.

“Pinyin is useful … it helps us to learn Chinese characters … thanks to pinyin, we learnt how to read,” said 92-year-old Chen Douxiang from Wanrong County, northern Shanxi Province, who still remembers the pinyin poem she learned 50 years ago.

The first edition of pinyin was adopted at the Fifth Session of the First National People’s Congress on February 11, 1958. It was then introduced to primary schools, and used to improve literacy among adults. By the end of 1959, two-thirds of residents in Wanrong County had learnt Mandarin by using pinyin. ( More )

Cantonese learners often wonder what are the differences between Cantonese and the official Chinese language — Mandarin.

Actually, there are a lot of differences which we need to understand and often find interesting. Here I can only list a few of them.

1.  Of course, the pronunciation is different. So different that Cantonese speaking and Mandarin speaking people cannot understand each other.   Some learners under estimate the differences and take the similarity for granted so that lots of misunderstanding is caused.

e.g.  The number 2 in Cantonese sound like “yi”, very similar to the number 1 in Mandarin “yi” (1st tone). The word for water melon in Mandarin “xi gua” sounds like ?? si¹gua¹  (Luffa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luffa ) 

2.  When Cantonese write formal articles, they tend to use formal Chinese Mandarin words expressions.  The major differences between the two dialects are mainly in their oral forms.

3. There are many words and expressions are directly “borrowed” from English,  so sometimes it is very difficult to translate them from Cantonese into Mandarin.

(to be updated)

Thank you for coming.

More contents are coming soon.  For now, we have Basic Cantonese