Cantonese Made Easy (4th Edition)

Author: Zhang Bingkun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: This textbook was compiled by the author based on years of experience in Cantonese teaching, specifically designed for vocational high school students to learn Cantonese spoken language and read written Cantonese texts. The main content includes:
(1) Common spoken language. This section serves as the fundamental material for learning and practicing Cantonese spoken language. It is organized from simple to complex, with four units containing 18 lessons and 100 dialogue sentence groups. Each dialogue group includes phonetic notation and written text for comparison. After each unit, there are review and test questions covering approximately 60 minutes of content, for review or self-assessment.
(2) A comparison of common Cantonese vocabulary in both spoken and written forms. This section includes over 300 commonly used pronouns, adjectives, verbs, nouns, etc., with Cantonese phonetic notation provided.
(3) Phonetic annotations for commonly used characters. Mastering the pronunciation of a certain number of characters is the foundation for reading written texts. This section selects and compiles over 2,000 commonly used characters, categorizing them by identical vowel sounds and providing phonetic annotations. The annotations help in correct self-study and reading. The textbook adopts a combination of Chinese Pinyin and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for phonetic notation, aligning with internationally recognized phonetic symbols. Students can quickly learn Cantonese pronunciation and tones by mimicking the teacher’s (audio recording) pronunciation. Particularly for learners who have mastered Chinese Pinyin and IPA, even without a Cantonese language environment, they can effectively learn Cantonese using the annotations in the book and achieve self-taught proficiency. This is a distinctive feature of the phonetic annotation method adopted in this textbook.