If the people you want to talk to live in Hong Kong, Macau or Guangzhou, or in a Cantonese-speaking family in Vancouver, Sydney or London, learn Cantonese. Mandarin will get you through a purchase in a Hong Kong shop, but it won't get you into the conversation at the dinner table. That settles the Cantonese-or-Mandarin question for most people. The rest of this guide is about the language itself: the tones, the romanisation, the characters and a sensible way to spend your first month.
Where Cantonese is spoken
Cantonese is the everyday language of Hong Kong and Macau and of much of Guangdong province, around Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta. It was also the language of many Chinese emigrants, so it's the Chinese you hear in many older Chinatowns, from San Francisco and Toronto to London and Kuala Lumpur. Estimates of speaker numbers vary with how you count, but they run to tens of millions, often put at around 80 million for Cantonese and its close Yue relatives.
Cantonese and Mandarin are both Chinese and share most of their writing system, but spoken, they aren't mutually intelligible. Cantonese has kept sounds Mandarin lost long ago, such as a final p, t or k: ten is 十, sap6 in Cantonese and shí in Mandarin.
Learn Cantonese tones first
Cantonese has six tones in most modern descriptions; the traditional count of nine adds three for short syllables ending in p, t or k. A tone isn't an emotion or an emphasis. It's part of the word, as much as its consonants are. The classic demonstration uses the syllable si:
| Tone | How it sounds | Example | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | high and level | 詩 si1 | poem |
| 2 | rising from mid to high | 史 si2 | history |
| 3 | mid and level | 試 si3 | to try |
| 4 | low and falling | 時 si4 | time |
| 5 | rising from low to mid | 市 si5 | city, market |
| 6 | low and level | 事 si6 | matter, thing |
The numbers come from Jyutping, the romanisation devised by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, which writes each tone as a digit after the syllable. Yale, an earlier system, is common in older textbooks. Pick one and stay with it. Jyutping spellings take a day to get used to: j is the English y, so 一 (one) is jat1; z is close to the English j or ts; c is close to ch; and eo and oe are vowels English doesn't have.
Learn every word with its tone from the first day. People who skip tones early spend a long time unlearning later, and a word in the wrong tone is often simply a different word.
Characters, written and spoken
Hong Kong and Macau use traditional characters; Guangzhou uses the simplified ones of mainland China. Formal writing, from newspapers to official letters, follows standard written Chinese, whose grammar is close to Mandarin, and Cantonese speakers read it aloud with Cantonese pronunciation. Spoken Cantonese has its own written form for messages, advertising, comics and some subtitles, with characters you won't find in a Mandarin textbook: 係 (hai6, to be), 唔 (m4, not), 佢 (keoi5, he or she), 嘅 (ge3, a possessive particle), 咗 (zo2, marks a completed action), 冇 (mou5, not have) and 喺 (hai2, at or in). "I am a student" is 我係學生 (ngo5 hai6 hok6 saang1) in spoken Cantonese and 我是學生 in standard written Chinese.
For a beginner, the sensible order is speaking first, with Jyutping, and characters added gradually, starting with words you can already say.
What is easy and what is hard
The easy part is how little machinery the grammar has. Verbs don't change for person or tense, nouns don't take plurals or gender, and the basic order is subject, verb, object, as in English. Time is shown with small particles: 我食飯 (ngo5 sik6 faan6) is "I eat", literally "I eat rice", and 我食咗飯 (ngo5 sik6 zo2 faan6) is "I've eaten".
Tones aside, the hard parts come in three kinds. Nouns need a classifier when you count them: 一本書 (jat1 bun2 syu1) is one book, 一隻狗 (jat1 zek3 gau2) one dog, and 個 (go3) is the general one to reach for when unsure. Sentence-final particles such as 啦 (laa1), 呀 (aa3), 囉 (lo1) and 喎 (wo3) carry the attitude English puts into tone of voice, and there are a lot of them. And Hong Kong Cantonese mixes in English freely, so you'll hear "OK", "sorry" and "check" in the middle of a Cantonese sentence.
First Cantonese phrases
| Cantonese | Jyutping | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 你好 | nei5 hou2 | hello |
| 早晨 | zou2 san4 | good morning |
| 唔該 | m4 goi1 | thanks for a service; please; excuse me |
| 多謝 | do1 ze6 | thank you for a gift or a compliment |
| 係 / 唔係 | hai6 / m4 hai6 | yes / no, literally "is" and "is not" |
| 幾多錢? | gei2 do1 cin2? | how much is it? |
| 食咗飯未呀? | sik6 zo2 faan6 mei6 aa3? | have you eaten yet?, an everyday greeting |
| 我唔識講廣東話 | ngo5 m4 sik1 gong2 gwong2 dung1 waa2 | I can't speak Cantonese |
| 再見 | zoi3 gin3 | goodbye |
The difference between m4 goi1 and do1 ze6 is worth learning on day one: thank the waiter with the first, and the friend who gives you a present with the second.
How to learn Cantonese in your first month
- Week 1: tones and Jyutping. Practise the six tones on single syllables every day, and listen to Cantonese for ten minutes, a TV drama or a cooking show, even without understanding it.
- Week 2: survival phrases. The table above, the numbers (一 jat1, 二 ji6, 三 saam1 and on to ten) and polite requests with m4 goi1.
- Week 3: sentence patterns. 我係 (ngo5 hai6, I am), 我想 (ngo5 soeng2, I'd like) and 我唔 (ngo5 m4, I don't) with a dozen verbs, plus 個 for counting.
- Week 4: the first characters. Learn to recognise thirty to fifty characters for words you can already say, and start messaging a Cantonese speaker or another learner.
The US Foreign Service Institute puts Cantonese in its hardest category for English speakers, about 88 weeks of full-time study for professional working proficiency, so think in years for fluency; our article on how long it takes to learn a language explains what those figures mean. A month gets you partway through A1 on the CEFR scale, and A2, where everyday exchanges become possible, is a realistic goal for the months after.
How Qlango helps
In Qlango, Cantonese is listed as Chinese (Cantonese) and taught at A1 and A2. Under each word you can show a Latin transliteration to lean on while the characters are new, and hide it again as you start reading. Pick-one-of-four exercises and flashcards train you to recognise characters, find-the-pairs links them to their meanings, and spaced repetition times each review for just before a word would slip away. The AI teacher in Premium answers questions about particles, classifiers or why a sentence needs 咗, and Premium also lets you learn offline. You choose the language you learn through, and every course and level is listed on the languages page.
That dinner table is the reason most people begin. Find Chinese (Cantonese) in Qlango, give the six tones your first week, and the next time someone there asks 食咗飯未呀?, you'll know whether to answer 食咗 or 未.
