As a resident of Cantonese speaking area, the truth that I do not speak Cantonese at all has surprised many people. It was the biggest reason that I chose Cantonese as my self-directed learning language for this semester. And I had a lot of fun from this semester’s learning experience.
I believed that the best way to learn a language is to learn it by ourselves. And this view came from my English learning experience. Language is special and learning a language is different from study other subjects such as math or accounting. Language study is a comprehensive process which includes the listening, speaking, reading and writing skills as well as communication skills. It also required the learners to have a well understanding of the background culture. So, usually everyone has a unique way of learning language and it can only work for him/her.
At the beginning of this semester, I made a learning plan for myself which looked a little bit unrealistic now. I planned to watch an episode of a Cantonese television drama Forensic Heroes each day to practice listening, and I also planned to chat with my friend who speaks Cantonese at least once a week, but neither of them worked well. First, I cannot keep myself from watching the subtitle. Additional, since the plot was very intense and suspenseful, I was so addictive to it and spend a whole weekend on watching it and finished all the episodes. Later on, when I tried to talk to my friend, I found out that we could not communicate well since my pronunciations were so inaccurate, so my friend had no idea what I was trying to express. So she suggested me to start it from some fundamental lesson.
I found that YouTube has a lot of good resources for Cantonese study. And this is a playlist which contains lots of Cantonese lessons. In that playlist, each video includes many vocabularies and grammars instructors. It taught me how to pronounce like a native speaker and how to naturally form sentences using the words we learned from each episode. I learned a lot of the most commonly used verbs and phrases. (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL743EE265854E9969)
To recognize more traditional Chinese characters, I also surf Hong Kong websites and read news there. Every time when I met a new character, I looked up the dictionary. Although the grammar of verbal Cantonese is different from Chinese, the grammars of writing are the same. And I also learned character by writing calligraphy.
Studying language is a very interesting experience. Except the vocabulary and grammar, I also learned some interesting local culture. For example, the way Cantonese speaker says 3:40 PM is different with most of us while we used to say “three forty”. However, what Cantonese speakers usually say are “three 8 numbers” which means the minute hand had past 8 numbers.
It was really so interesting and I will continue on my study plan in the future!
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