Cantonese

Cantonese, treated as a language rather than a dialect.

Jyutping over the words you are still learning, audio that runs with the text, and a lookup panel that shows you the simplified form as well, because written Cantonese is where most learners come unstuck.

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粵語

Why it stalls

Almost nothing is made for Cantonese learners.

The courses that exist stop at tourist phrases, and the moment you look at something real you hit written Cantonese: characters like 嘅, 咗 and 喺 that no Mandarin course prepares you for, six tones that romanisation systems disagree about, and a gap between what people write and what they say. Most learners give up here, not on the grammar.

On the page

Jyutping over the word, simplified in the panel

Jyutping sits on top of the words you have not learned yet, with the tone number where you can see it, since a Cantonese word without its tone is half a word. Tap anything and the panel also gives you the simplified form, which is the fastest way to connect a character you are reading to one you may already know.

今日gam1 jat6天氣tin1 hei3好好hou2 hou2。

The weather is great today.

One tap

The word answers you where it stands.

Not the first entry in a dictionary list, but what the word is doing in this sentence. Hear it, ask about it, or save it, without leaving the line you were reading.

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So it sticks

Every word you save comes back at the right moment.

Saved words join a review queue built on spaced repetition, and each one keeps the sentence you met it in. Your Cantonese queue is its own: learn three languages at once and none of them bleed into the others.

How the review works

Cantonese

Questions worth asking first.

Do I need Mandarin first?

No. They share a writing system and very little else that helps a beginner, and starting with Mandarin mostly teaches you pronunciations you then have to unlearn. If you already have Mandarin, the shared characters are a real head start and the simplified form in the lookup panel is there to make use of it.

Is it written Cantonese or standard written Chinese?

Both turn up, because both are real. News tends toward standard written Chinese, while a lot of the spoken material and anything conversational uses written Cantonese with the characters you will actually see in Hong Kong.

Which romanisation do you use?

Jyutping, with tone numbers. It is the system with the widest agreement behind it, and the tone numbers are far easier to read at a glance above a character than diacritics would be.

Or learn another. Or three at once.

Start with something you actually wanted to read.

Make an account and you are reading Cantonese in under a minute. No card, no trial countdown.

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