Hugh D. R. Baker

This one of the few helpful books on learning Cantonese (The local dialect of Chinese from Hong Kong, Macau, Canton and Shenzhen).

I found the coursebook easy to learn because I am fluent in Mandarin and Hookien - and some Cantonese words have similar sounds to the other two languages. I think a person with zero knowledge in Chinese would have a harder time grasping the concept of the Cantonese lessons in this book.

Every lesson has a dialogue and script which the student must learn from. I show more think these dialogues are essential to learning the language. However, the scripts are written in Chinese and there are no reference material in the book on how to write or read these characters. (Hence it would be much more difficult for people who have no knowledge in Chinese to understand the scripts).

What I found useful with the coursebook and CD is the fact that the audio materials helped me identify the various tones and pronounciations of the Cantonese language. There are eight tones in Cantonese, twice as many as Mandarin. The CD helped me a lot in deciphering the langauge. The CD is essential in learning the language - I doubt if you can learn the language with the book alone. show less

Department of History
University of Hong Kong