speak cantonese but cannot read or write

[Kanishka]

Hi to all who are ready to help

I speak English, German, Hindi, Farsi, understand Arabic and speak Cantonese but I cannot read or write Cantonese. Is there any way I could manage to learn vocabularies with the right pronunciation without having to learn the Chinese Characters. I am not amongst the Chinese for the last 22 years so I have forgotten many words but I still understand Cantonese movies without much difficulty.

Thanks in advance

[陳德聰]

Depends. If you're capable of the same in your other languages then you can probably do it in Cantonese too.

[Hofmann]

Since you speak so many languages, it should be easy for you to look up the correct speech sounds and just say them. There are no sounds in Cantonese that you have not used before. I find it impractical to learn vocabulary without learning characters, but whatever. Here's a dictionary and here's reading material.

[Michaelyus]

In terms of learning romanisations: although you can get away with learning just Jyut⁶ping¹ for the CantoDict from the online dictionary linked to above, in practice I think most learners (in the West at least) end up being competent readers of Yale and probably Sidney Lau as well.

[Kanishka]

hey guys thanks alot, especially for the site http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk, it is really helpful. i didnt manage to find such a page up until now. I wonder if there is any site you could search the pronounciation by the help of some audio outputs.

[Kanishka]

I had an old Chinese friend (fung siu expert) back in Hong Kong who gave me the name Ai Kwan Lung. I know what lung means, dragon. what does kwan mean and how is Ai Kwan Lung written in traditional Chinese.

[Glenn]

I usually go from this page:

http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/

You can see the search field there, and you can select your criteria by the pull-down menu. If you select "Jyutping (Cantonese)" you can search by reading, and I believe they frequently have audio samples.

[陳德聰]

I had an old Chinese friend (fung siu expert) back in Hong Kong who gave me the name Ai Kwan Lung. I know what lung means, dragon. what does kwan mean and how is Ai Kwan Lung written in traditional Chinese.

Feng shui?

There is pretty much zero way to know exactly what characters to use for your name because there are so many homophones in Chinese. Without the meaning for "kwan" then how are we supposed to figure that out?

[tjlai]

Hey there,

If you've got an apple iPhone, iPad etc then the 'Qingwen' app is really good! You can search for words in Jyutping, english meaning, or by writing Chinese characters. You can choose to display the characters in Traditional or Simplified Chinese and also choose whether you want the audio in Cantonese or Mandarin. Very useful app.