How to Learn Cantonese: Tones, Characters, First Words

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:

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.