Why I have created this blog
My name is Marcelo and I have been learning Cantonese for 1 year.One thing that has always irritated me a little bit is the lack of interesting learning material.The books I have come across so far were mostly targeting newbies and consisted in a bunch of words and phrases, like “what to say when you’re at the restaurant” or ” barganing at the market”.Frankly, I think one cannot expect to get fluent with just that.Even though there are some good books out there, they are not without flaws either.Usually, they don’t provide Chinese characters in the transcripts.We have to rely on those strange romanization systems.Not to mention the amount of English spoken in the recordings.For some reason, the people who write these books think they have to explain in detail everything that will happen in the dialogue.Because of that I decided to create my own studying material.I bought some books with some short stories and asked my friends to change them from written Cantonese to spoken Cantonese, and to record those stories too. I will be uploading these stories, as well as any other interesting thing I may stumble across.
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A good idea and a ver useful resource for interediate to advanced learners of Cantonese.
The only issue I have is the size of the font on the site. It is far too small.
14K Guy said this on September 21st, 2007 at 8:43 am
Thanks for these stories. You are so right about the lack of simple stories with text. Please keep it up.
Student said this on September 21st, 2007 at 10:33 am
I tried to change the size of the font to a bigger one, but it didn’t turn out as I expected. The site got too messy,and realy not elegant, so to speak. If you’re having trouble to read the stories due to the size of the font, I suggest you to copy and paste them to microsoft word and then change the size of the font. As for the stories, I’ll try to upload new ones on a regular basis. I very much appreciate the positive response. Thanks!
Marcelo
cantostories said this on September 27th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Great resource, really appreciated
Errr to those with font-size issues then just increase the font-size in your browser. In Firefox CTRL + will do it
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I am just about to go away for a few days but I am sure I will be coming back here a lot.
chris said this on September 30th, 2007 at 11:47 am
This blog is an excellent idea! I’m using this type of material to study other foreign languages and I’ve always been upset there isn’t more material like this in Cantonese. Do you have longer stories available to you? Because as far as learning via this method is concerned, the longer the story is the better.
bobcat said this on October 7th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Hi bobcat, Sorry, but the stories I have are either around 5 minutes long or short ones.Well, at least for me short stories work just as well as long ones.But I find that the longer the story, the harder it is to pay full attention to all the details and nuances.On the other hand, long stories are usually more interesting and enthralling. Does anyone have a different opinion?
cantostories said this on October 14th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Short stories can work ok too, I guess, but I prefer longer ones since you hear the same words over and over again in different contexts.
Say, do you have the Sidney Lau series of textbooks? They have some pretty long dialogs in Cantonese characters but there’s no audio to go with it. They aren’t as interesting as fairy tales, but I know a lot of Cantonese learners who would be extremely grateful to the audio for it. Maybe after you are done with your short stories you might consider recording those dialogs?
bobcat said this on November 20th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Hi bobcat,
I haven’t heard of Sidney Lau’s book before and I don’t have it. Do you know if it’s available on the internet? If I can find it, I might record it in the future.The only tricky thing though is that since the book is consisted of dialogues I would have to find somebody else to record.
cantostories said this on November 21st, 2007 at 11:12 am
The Sidney Lau textbooks are considered the most comprehensive course for learning Cantonese and were originally designed to teach Cantonese to foreigners serving in the Hong Kong Police force. And although several decades old, last I heard they were still being used there. You can read more about it here:
http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/read.php?1,1222,1222#msg-1222 http://www.chinalanguage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=502&highlight=sidney+lau&sid=5a711bc862a9eed7e6b152ac57c45197
The books can be ordered online from the HK Government bookstore.
http://bookstore.esdlife.com/eng/default.asp
Click on “Government Bookstore” and continue until you get to the search page. Then using the menu search for “Cantonese Booklets.”
bobcat said this on November 22nd, 2007 at 2:11 am