Want to become better at spoken and understanding Cantonese. Anyone have tips on where to start?
You could start with focusing on pronunciation and Jyutping, then work through some beginner textbooks/courses, along with getting listening practice. (Copy and pasting from previous comments.)
Resources for pronunciation:
Fluent Forever’s Cantonese pronunciation guide
Textbooks/courses/grammar resources:
Teach Yourself Cantonese (+ audio)
Mango Languages (check your library for free access)
Pimsleur (check your library for free access)
Cantolounge’s Cantonese Grammar Series
Listening practice:
LingQ Mini Stories (free, but requires sign-up)
Language Tools Cantonese Conversations (free, but requires sign-up)
Dictionaries:
Tutoring:
Find a learning method that works for you. For most people it would be watching videos or TV shows. I personally would recommend the news channel since the anchors are less likely to have an accent and they tend to have clearer speech.
P. S. Have you seen this post?
Try out the free Android app called “Yuhtgong”. That has more than 5000 words for writing, reading and listening practice.
Please try this channel, it might help you.
Take classes
there are some great anki decks with vocab and example sentences read out plus translated. Won’t teach you on its own but great resource.
The language learning app Drops is worth a try. It’s one of the few that has Cantonese and is fairly simple to start practicing for 5-15mins a day. That’s not enough to get fluent, but it’s nice and simple to bulk out any language learning you’re doing.
a fun way to learn Cantonese outside of classrooms if you are interested in anime: go to hkanime.com, and pick whatever anime you love. Watch them over and over and repeat sentences after dialogues. This works well if you have some basic cantonese knowledge and can read the subs, or you want to advance your skills in listening.
but gotta have a vpn installed in your chrome if you don’t live in Asia.
Can’t watch youtube tutorials cuz i’ll fall asleep immediately just listening to the audio. Make studying something fun so you don’t just get tired all the time.
One of the reasons I want to go to [insert college name in the states]is that they offer beginner Cantonese classes(w/ no credits tho)
If I’m reading the map right, then we’ve only 8 courses in SoCal?
Technically, UC San Diego has a Cantonese course, but it’s self studied, and the person testing you is a Mandarin tutor, so I think it’s not good but if that’s all you got, go get those college credits.
The others are 3 Chinese schools for children and 2 private language schools, but I noticed they are far away from where Chinese people actually live.