Earlier on this web site, I just chose a phonetic Cantonese romanization system at will. After some good research, I found that we need to adopt the most popular system called Jyutping, which has a lot of good features.

More on that soon.

(Special Thanks to Mike, who just reminded us to improve as soon as possible. We agree. We need to remove any confusion from our site. Mike, please contact us with your real email)

The following differences between Jyutping and the Yale romanization should be noted:

Jyutping and the Yale romanization system represent Cantonese pronunciations with the same letters in:

* The initials: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw, w.
* The vowel: aa (except when using alone), a, e, i, o, u,yu.
* The nasal consonant: m, ng.
* The coda: i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k.

But they have difference with the following exceptions:

* The vowels eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping, while the eu represents both vowels in Yale.
* The initial j represents /j/ in Jyutping while y is used instead in Yale.
* The initial z represents /ts/ in Jyutping while j is used instead in Yale.
* The initial c represents /tsʰ/ in Jyutping while ch is used instead in Yale.
* In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel yu, then the initial j is appended before the vowel. In Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances.
* Jyutping defines three finals not in Yale: eu /ɛːu/, em /ɛːm/, and ep /ɛːp/. These three finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6 (掉), lem2 (舐), and gep6 (夾).
* To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping while Yale originally uses tone marks together with the letter h (though tone numbers can be used in Yale as well).

For further information on both systems, please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping