Colloquial Cantonese: The Complete Course for Beginners

The most difficult feature of learning Cantonese is undoubtedly mastering its tonal system. This is a course which will get a beginning learner off to a really good start, if they practice faithfully with the accompanying CD set. The preliminary material on tones is particularly good because it demonstrates the contrast between the tones very thoroughly. Each chapter has dialogues that build up vocabulary in particularly helpful ways. The first chapter, about which other reviewers have been somewhat negative, has conversations in a market in which the speakers are buying different kinds of fruits. Well, you have to learn numbers sometime, right? From there you move on to talking about work, transportation, eating out and everyday life at home. Grammar is well treated too, although the books by Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews (also published by Routledge)are probably the most comprehensive source available in English if what you want is a really good grammar reference. One slight negative feature- all of the book is in romanization. Certainly a case can be made that it is good to get a fast start in speaking Cantonese (or Mandarin) before settling in for the long, hard pull that is learning Chinese writing, but if the dialogues at least were written in characters it would probably make a Cantonese teacher's life a little easier.

Colloquial Cantonese: A Complete Language Course (Colloquial Series) I have ordered quite a few Cantonese language courses; CD's and books, but this has been the best I have found so far. The CD and the book work together well and the spoken Cantonese on the CD is clear and well enunciated, and the kind of language one might actually use as opposed to some of the stilted and contrived discourse I have seen in other sources. I highly recommend this book and CD together.

Of all the Cantonese books I've seen, I find this one to be clearly the best. No funky pinyin - this one is the same as found in most other Cantonese books - clear focus on spoken language only - don't even think of beginning to learn reading or writing with this ! - but very practical, progressive, pedagogical and clear, modern and even (sometimes) funny !

Knowing a little cantonese only, it was great to learn a TON more! My sister knows NO cantonese, and this helped her a lot! The CDs are great - great replay value!

This is a very good course. I wish it was longer, (maybe the authors could be prevailed upon to do a sequel) but it's full useful, contemporary vocabulary, the recordings on the tapes are excellent (and actually match the book!) and the grammatical explanations are very comprehensive and very clearly written. It's one of the best Cantonese programs I've come across.