The reason most of us study a language is to be able to communicate with locals in a very casual way. We don’t wish to sound like someone who learned textbook language skills; we want to sound like someone who learned the language from interacting with people in every day settings. If this is what you want to accomplish by learning a language and your language of choice is Cantonese, then Colloquial Cantonese is a great book choice for you.
In total, the Colloquial series offers learning material for more than sixty languages, one of them being Cantonese. As seasoned language curriculum creators, all of the books in the Colloquial series follow a pretty standard but effective set up.
In this beginner’s Cantonese book, there are fifteen topical chapters covering all of the standard entry level subjects. After you use this book, you should be able to talk about yourself, find your way around town, ask for help, order food, and talk about the weather.
The book presents the content mainly in a transliteration of Cantonese with only a smattering of characters. This makes it a lot easier to learn to speak and understand Cantonese, but almost impossible to learn how to read and write. Because of the complexity of learning to read and write, you will most likely need to find a book entirely dedicated to the craft and this one isn’t it. If you’re not worried about learning how to read and write, then this book works great. In the introduction there’s audio and printed content to help you get familiar with the sounds and the Romanization thereof. Because the lessons rely on Romanized Cantonese, you must spend ample time learning the system used in this book at the beginning otherwise it will be much harder for you later.
"The reason most of us study a language is to be able to communicate with locals in a very casual way. We don’t wish to sound like someone who learned textbook language skills; we want to sound like someone who learned the language from interacting with people in every day settings."
The audio set makes it very possible for students to study independently, but if you would like to use this book and audio set with a teacher it can be done. If you are a Cantonese teacher you can have your students listen to the audio at home and work on their pronunciation of the same in class. You can also have your students read the dialogues out loud to help them get familiar with speaking as well.
Colloquial Cantonese is a pretty straightforward book and audio set. While there’s no real “wow” factor, the book and audio CD really do the trick; if you’re a dedicated student and study on a regular basis, you should be able to understand a fair amount of Cantonese after studying with Colloquial Cantonese for just a few weeks.
