100% self-taught learner here. I felt compelled to write this product review with the express purpose of offsetting the utterly amazing and insightful two-word review and shimmering 1-star rating of "Too wordy" from the first reviewer of this book's edition. The irony and lack of self-awareness is staggering. I would suggest to the good reviewer that their time would be better served listening to audio materials or hiring a speaking tutor or something, rather than giving the worst possible rating to what is frankly one of the best books out there on this subject.
Anyhow, for those uninitiated about this book's history and/or are curious about learning Cantonese, this is the latest embodiment of a classic textbook previously titled "Teach Yourself Cantonese," authored by Hugh Baker and Ho Pui-Kei. It has been worked over and tweaked a bit since I purchased Teach Yourself Cantonese about 7 years ago, but it is fundamentally the original text, and this is a good thing. For my style of learning, I am glad that the authors decided "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." They merely gave the book a well-deserved tune-up.
I own something like a half dozen learner-level textbooks on Cantonese language using both Jyutping as well as Yale (this book uses Yale romanisation), and though I have not used the Sidney Lau materials, I consider this to be the premier beginner-to-intermediate textbook on learning generic modern Cantonese. It has certainly been of the most benefit to me since the content is readable, compelling and contains dialogue that a beginner can relate to in real life situations. The cherry on top is that most of the dialogues are charming and have a flair of humour to them.
For those interested in this textbook and are already familiar with past editions of Teach Yourself Cantonese, you will be pleased with two fairly significant updates:
(1) the authors have switched terminology from their original dialogues that were colloquially outdated, examples being syu (place - 處) / johk-yat (昨日- yesterday), and have replaced them with the current respective colloquial de facto standards douh (place - 度) / ( yesterday - depicted as 擒日) . These historical artifacts were never really an impediment to the learning progress of any serious learner anyhow.
(2) The audio recordings were previously these hissing CD copies of an original audio cassette recording. They have COMPLETELY revamped the audio format and the way that the recordings are presented to the listener, and they are included conveniently in .MP3 format. A tremendous amount of work has clearly gone into reworking the audio, the dialogues were recorded in high fidelity, and they have even taken the extra care to introduce some dialogue-appropriate background noises to make the listening experience feel more immersive.
Also, as has been pointed out in reviews by others of the previous version of Complete Cantonese, the text is more readable. The format of the book has about 70% more page surface area, and the layout people have done an excellent job.
Well done Baker & Ho, you're the reason why Cantonese was interesting to learn in the first place.
- Series: Teach Yourself Complete
- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Teach Yourself; 1 edition (March 1, 2016)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1473600820
- ISBN-13: 978-1473600829
- Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.8 x 9.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Customer Reviews: 16 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#334,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #59 in Chinese Language Instruction (Books)
- #1582 in Foreign Dictionaries & Thesauruses
- #363 in Study & Teaching Reference (Books)
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