Customer Reviews

Beginning Cantonese (Critical Languages Series)

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This program is a great way to learn Cantonese when you haven't got a class or instructor to teach it in your home town. The actor and actresses are old fashion, which gives you the traditional feel of Cantonese. The dialogues are defined by sentences and word for word (the best feature). The sentences give you an adapted and sensible meaning, while the word for word definition gives you the literal meaning. The literal meaning doesn't make much sense at first, but it helps train you to think in the foreign language by drilling the pattern in your head. You're going to use the language in the way that you learn it, so if you learn the placement of Cantonese words literally, you won't have to memorize the syntax of the grammar. I love it, love it, love it!!

If you were starting from scratch to learn Cantonese on your own, I don't think Beginning Cantonese should be your first choice. Without establishing any grounding,it jumps straight into dialogues delivered by native speakers at normal to rapid speaking speed.

I had already gone through the full Pimsleur course and half way through the FSI course before buying Beginning Cantonese. With that foundation I have found Beginning Cantonese very helpful indeed.

The twenty video dialogues with accompanying romanised text are excellent for playing over and over again. You can highlight words or sentences in the text to get Cantonese pronunciations or English translations. You can also record your own speech and compare to the pronunciation of the native speakers. A very user friendly package.

There are other features such as exercises involving multiple choice questions,dictation and the use of flash cards. I don't use any of them but others might find them helpful. There are also many useful footnotes to the texts explaining usage and Cantonese customs.

I think Beginning Cantonese is great value for money. Worth every cent for the video/audio alone. For straight up beginners though, I would recommend starting with something like Pimsleur or Teach Yourself Cantonese, then using this as a supplement.

Well, I finally found a Cantonese course that was worse than the Instant Immersion product. Their romanization is the most confusing I've seen, with several words jammed together to make large, hard-to-read words. From what I can tell, this course also totally ignores the tones in Cantonese, making it extremely difficult to tell exactly which word is being mangled in their horrid spelling. It's obviously intended as a companion to a course in their university and is almost useless on its own. The very first lesson contains dozens of new words used in poor context. Definitions are not always easily found and the native speakers in the audio/video clips are so fast I suspect they work in an auction house in their spare time.

Don't waste your time here. Try Pimsleur's wonderful (though short) course or the Teach Yourself course by Hugh Baker. The Language Learning course from Laser Publishing Group is okay too.