In Cantonese all syllables start with consonants. I think after 4 years of learning Cantonese, I have subconsciously been conditioned to only hear syllable boundaries when the syllable starts with a consonant.

The only exception to that are a few words that could just as easily start with “ng”, and the “ng” is left off, such as:
歐 au1
我 o23
屋 uk55

To my knowledge, the vowels “e”, “eu”, “i” never begin a syllable in Cantonese.

But in Hoisanwa, syllables can start with any of the vowels. A lot of the syllables that start with a “d” in Cantonese drop that “d” when spoken in Hoisanwa:
dak55 | aak52 | 得
dei11 | i52 | 地
deui33 | ooi33 | 對
dung55 | ung52 | 東
duk11 | uk52 | 讀

NOTE: I think I got some of those Hoisanwa tones wrong, and too tired at the moment to look them up, but you get the idea …

I’m not sure if I really had a point, except that there is a lot more variety to the syllable boundaries in Hoisanwa than in Cantonese. And I think that’s possibly why I’ve had trouble noticing the start of a new syllable sometimes? Any one else feel similarly?

In Cantonese, any syllables ending in p/t/k will always be a level pitch countour.
high-level: 執笠、不、北
mid-level: 鴨、押、百
low-level: 習、沒、樂

The only exception is one of those syllables undergoing tone change to mid-rising, for example as the second syllable in a word.

When some people count the # of tones, they only account for the pitch contours, so 6 tones in Cantonese. The more Chinese way of thinking of tones is to consider p/t/k syllable endings as a separate tone from those other syllables that have the same pitch contour but do not end in p/t/k.

Since Cantonese only has p/t/k syllables in the 3 level contours, they will say that Cantonese has 9 tones.

However, the main point of this post is that in Hoisanwa – although I still haven’t made much progress – I did notice that the “you plural” syllable is “niak” with a high-falling tone. I wonder how many tones there are in Hoisanwa then, if counting syllables ending in p/t/k as a separate syllable?

And I vaguely remember learning somewhere that syllables ending in p/t/k can only ever be level tones … but I guess that must have been a Cantonese-specific rule?

There were others that I tried out, but I don’t remember their names.  Most of them spent too much time talking in Mandarin, or the audio quality was poor.  Here are the ones I’ve been listening to and watching:

audio
SBS Cantonese – this I mostly play in the background. I only actively listen to the cooking shows or children’s stories
動漫廢物 – this one I only recently discovered, but they seem very animated so it holds my interest. Every episode is 30+ minutes.
香港電台：一潮天子 – these are all about 5 to 10 minutes. They remind of Loveline
香港電台：人民人情 – although these are 2 minutes, the first 45 seconds is wasted on the introduction.  The rest is still useful since they are trying to introduce vocabulary words and they explain a little bit about the topic
香港電台：空中結緣 – seem to be a collection of stories, and there are a lot of them, and they are each 55 minutes long, so lots of material that is easy to understand

video
香港電台：HONG KONG．300 – short technology-related videos
香港電台：天下父母經-牛爸爸講古 – some quick children’s cartoons
香港電台：有房出租 – a new TV show that focuses on a house full of renters, I found it somewhat funny but I didn’t understand everything that was going on

Please leave comments if you know of other songs from Beyond that include colloquial Cantonese.

I think I’ll keep making these, and hopefully my explanations get more clear with more practice.

• content to stretch out across whole screen, instead of just using about a third of the screen
• tables to not overlap with the sidebar (this happened when the sidebar was on the right)
• good table formatting (in some themes, the tables for my transcripts are just text with spacing between them, instead of actual tables)
• ability to use tag cloud (some themes don’t have this)
• ability to have custom pages (some themes don’t have this)

Sometimes in the “preview” mode of the theme it will look like the post will use up the whole screen, but then once I activate that theme, the actual blog shows a really narrow content area.

So does anyone know a good wordpress theme to use?  Thanks in advance!

When I first learned the expression 無雷公咁遠 mou4 leui4 gung1 gam3 yun5, it was by far my favorite phrase.  I tried to use it as often as possible.  Literally, it means to be “so far away that you can’t hear the thunder”.  Like when a storm is so far away you can’t even hear the thunder.  But it can be used to describe anything that is really far away.

I guess this is an example of the X咁Y idioms, of which there are several. 

The X咁Y  in this case basically means “it’s as Y as X”, or “X, that’s how Y it is”.

Also there are similar X到Y idioms. These expressions are saying to “do X until the point of Y”.

I’ve used anki for awhile but i’m still not sure how people are tracking the number or words they know…do you have a deck just of words vs sentences vs mixed that you review to pull the stats? Does the number of vocab include characters and compounds or do you break that out at all? Would be really useful to know how you pull those stats out of anki to show progress etc.

Anki is definitely keeping track of this information, since it has charts which show the # of cards added and first reviewed. 

So maybe someone out there has created an anki plugin that will export the date added and date first reviewed of each card in the deck.  I tried quickly searching for some, but I didn’t find any.  Maybe someone else can answer that question.

However, I use excelt to keep track of how many words I have added and reviewed each month.  Mainly, I am doing this because I was already using excel to help import cards into Anki in the first place.

I carry around a small notebook with me when I know I am going to be doing a lot of practice.  Everytime there is a word I wish I knew how to say in Cantonese, then I write it down in the notebook.  Then when I get back home, I look them up in cantodict.  Also if there is an example sentence which I find memorable, I add that to the card as well. 

Then when I get several of them, I copy paste them into a text file and use Anki’s “File > Import…” menu to import them as a tab-separated file.  I keep the same # of columns in my spreadsheet as I have in my card template:

So, I generate two cards for each word: a Cantonese -> English card and a English -> Cantonese card.  In the previous post, I was actually counting words (2 cards), not cards.

I didn’t start learning Chinese characters until about 1.5 years after I started studying how to speak Cantonese, so my oldest cards don’t actually include characters.  Also, I try to only have 1 new word per “fact” (a fact being the two “front” and “back” cards), so if an example sentence has several new words, I add cards for those words as well (and find new example sentences for them).

As for cards per character versus per compound, I count by compounds.  A single character can be used in so many ways, I personally think it is more motivational for me when I see the number of new words I am learning, not just the number of characters.  I did once have a character deck with one card per character.  But I ended up not really learning the characters and their meanings as well, so I think it’s better to seem them in context.  And for some characters with multiple pronuncations and multiple uses, there is just way too much information per character for a single card.

There are also a lot of great ideas about flashcard setup on the blog Thousand Mile Journey.  He has made several posts on different types of Anki decks, and he links to them from this page:

http://eldonreeves.wordpress.com/how-to-learn-cantonese/

The journey to increase vocabulary is a long, slow, frustrating journey.  So I thought I could share my progress here.  I know it’s easy to feel like you are learning very little.  But when you look back, you’ll see you’ve come a long way.

I actually started learning Cantonese in August 2007, but I didn’t start keeping track until September 2008 when I started using Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/).  So the first few months in the below table will show the previous year’s worth of words I sped through initially.  Most of those words came from:

• the FSI textbooks at http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Cantonese. 

Then also in the second half of 2009, I put in more effort than usual to really try and learn 10 words a day.  Most of the words in that period came from:

• books I purchased at Greenwood Press: http://www.green-woodpress.com/products_list.php?iscantonese=1
• the example sentences at Cantodict: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/examplelist.htm?level=-1&wordtype=2&filter_by_audio=0

More recently, I’ve slowed down my vocabulary acquisition since I’ve been focused on other things as well.  Now most of the words are coming from TV shows I am watching:

• Hunter X Hunter (on veoh.com) – http://www.veoh.com/collection/hxhcanto
• 同事三分親 re-runs (a 2008 show on TVB) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Selling_Secrets