Complete Cantonese with Two Audio CDs: A Teach Yourself Guide [Paperback]

This is a great set to begin learning an amazing language.

I know a large amount of Japanese and decided that I would like to study Cantonese and Mandarin (there a a lot more manderin books available than there are Cantonese books.

This book uses the Yale system of romanization.

Two CD's will definatly help you with pronunciation - I find pronunciation of Mandirin and Cantonese to be the hardest part of learning the conversational language. Cantonese has more tones than mandarin which adds a litle to the difficulty.

I love this book and am finding it to be a very fun and effective text.

This book focusses on the Cantonese spoken in the Hong Kongg (SAR).

The book and CD's come in a plastic case with the CD's on one side and a compartment for the book on the other side.

NOTE: If you want a introduction to Mandarin also I recomened "Chinese for Dummies" it is a easy guide to study with it does not have hanzi though, but there are a few really good books I have found to learn characters:
1. "Reading and Writing Chinese Traditional Character Edition" Tutle Publishing or "Reading and Writing Chinese Simplified Character Edition" also a Tutle book. These books contain stroke order diagrams to instruct you on the proper order to write the characters - which is very important.
2. "The Oxford Pocket Chinese Dictionary" This dictionary is really good and contains both traditional and simplified characters (Where they differ).

This book has been released at least twice before under the title "Teach Yourself Cantonese". The dialogs have not changed, so don't bother buying this if you already have "Teach Yourself Cantonese". I have a few problems with this book:

- It progresses too quickly. It's so challenging that it took me three tries to get through without quitting. When I did make it through, it took over six months of work. As a comparison, it only has about half the audio content of the beginner Assimil courses, but probably covers about the same ground.

- There's not enough work on recognizing and reproducing the sounds of Cantonese. Some of the phonetics and tones can be very tough and make the dialogs much harder to get through if you're uncomfortable with them. See Popup Cantonese (dot com) and check out there Basic Cantonese level podcasts for a good intro before starting this book.

- There are no sentence translations. They only give you word lists and expect you to translate the sentences for everything past the first few lessons. This is extremely time-consuming and makes me feel like I might as well have transcribed and translated Cantonese content myself from, say, a movie. I'd have to bring problem sentences to my Cantonese-speaking friends to see if my translations were correct. Often they were not. If you don't have Cantonese-speaking friends, then good luck on translating it accurately.

- The CD tracks are two dialogs to a track. Why? I had to manually rip and edit the tracks so that they'd only have dialog to a track so that I could drill it with repetitive listening.

- The audio doesn't always use the same words as the transcription, and that confused me a number of times while drilling the audio.

- Some of the actors speak very quickly and can be hard for a beginner to understand.

The things I like about the book:

- It's a good source of dialogs to study. They're just about the right length--about two minutes each--and they are entertaining as well (once you translate them).

- The grammar is kept to a minimum and done after each dialog is presented. They do a good job of predicting the questions I'd have and I'd only occasionally I'd have unanswered grammar questions.

- It uses Yale romanization which is the easiest to read in my opinion. The first edition used a more difficult system, so I'm glad they switched it.

Being one of the few Cantonese learning resources out there for beginners, it's still a must-buy despite its shortcomings.

This book is of no help in learning pronunciation as Cantonese has no simplified vocabulary as Mandarin has Pin Yin. It is a language that must be heard to learn.The Pimsleur program is a better program. Sadly Cantonese is not available from Rosetta Stone.