Cantonese

Cantonese-Speaking World

Standard Cantonese, a variant of Cantonese (Yue) Chinese, is spoken natively in and around the cities of Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau in Southern China. It is the de facto official Chinese spoken language of Hong Kong and Macau, and a lingua franca of Guangdong province and some neighbouring areas. It is also spoken by many overseas Chinese of Guangdong, Hong Kong or Macau origin in Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, United States, Australia, Europe and elsewhere.

Historically, Cantonese was the most common form of Chinese spoken by overseas Chinese communities in the Western world. That situation has changed now with the increasing importance of China's official dialect of Pǔtōnghuà/Standard Mandarin Chinese (traditional Chinese: 普通話; simplified Chinese: 普通话, literally "common speech").

In popular speech, Standard Cantonese is often known simply as Cantonese, though in academic linguistics the name can also refer to the broader category to which it belongs, Cantonese language (traditional Chinese: 粵語; simplified Chinese: 粤语; pinyin: Yuèyǔ; Jyutping: Jyut6jyu5).

Cantonese Learning Resources

Podcasts for Cantonese Learners

Podcasts are a great way to learn languages. You can use Free Language to check the vitality of available Cantonese language-learning podcasts by viewing their feed page. Click on any podcast below to view general info followed by the latest items from it's feed. You can tell if the feed has been updated lately, and it'll save you some time in choosing which podcasts to subscribe to.

News in Cantonese

News feeds from around the Cantonese-speaking world provide language exposure and practice joined with current events, culture, politics, science, sports and more. At Free Language, you can view summaries of these feeds and jump to view full articles when your interest is piqued.

Cantonese Internet TV

Watching people speak Cantonese is a good way to gain exposure to the language in a non-study environment. This is great for folks who aren't living where the language is spoken and especially those already proficient in listening comprehension. If you don't understand anything, it's cool to "vegg out" for a while, but it's not the most productive thing you can do learn. Try to find something with subtitles, and you're on the way. ;)

If you do get into Internet TV, I highly recommend Miro, a free and open source media player with multimedia RSS capability that supports Linux, Mac and Windows. Hey, "because open media matters."

At any rate, below you'll find resources with literally thousands of Internet TV stations in a wide variety of languages. Amongst them you'll find Cantonese. Enjoy!

Helpful Resources and Tools for Cantonese

FoxLingo Free Firefox Browser Extension Software for Translating Web Pages
Online Flashcard Exchange Community
Foreign Language Translation Extensions/Tools/Plugins/Add-Ons for the Firefox Web Browser
PhraseBase.com Multi-Lingual Conversational Phrase Database Resource
Word2Word.com Website

Make Friends Learning Cantonese

Social language learning has become incredibly popular on the web as it has transcended language barriers in previously impossible ways. Right now someone in South Africa is could be interested in teaching you Cantonese in exchange for your English skills. If you speak other languages, the odds are even better that you'll find someone interesed in a language exchange.

Note that not all networks below support Cantonese. Collectively, though, they support pretty much every language.

Subscribe to Cantonese Updates

Get all the latest Cantonese language resources from Free Language delivered to your RSS reader or inbox. Click here to subscribe.

Don't know what RSS is? Click here and it could save you plenty of time. And perhaps revolutionize your web experience.

Cantonese Aggregator

Free Language aggregates (brings together) web feeds in and about the Cantonese language for the purpose of exposing users to content in this language. Not only that, users interested in getting this dynamic combo of Cantonese feeds in on single RSS feed can click here and sit back. :)

Best of Luck!

I wish you the best of luck in your language-learning endeavors! Please send me suggestions about resources and improving this website.