Tag: cantonese

Finished the FSI Cantonese Anki deck (a sort of review)

As I wrote a few posts ago, I’m mostly dropping Cantonese in 2021. However I don’t want to lose my progress entirely over the course of the year, so I’ll still be reviewing my Anki deck cards and Memrise lessons, reading and watching a little Cantonese here and there, that sort of thing. Shortly before Christmas 2020, I finished up the FSI Cantonese Anki deck, so I figured I should say a few words about it here, this being my language blog in addition to anime/manga. However did I make any progress from it? I think I did, but it’s hard to tell because:

  1. I have no objective standard for marking my progress. I didn’t take any tests before, or try to understand something and fail etc. There’s no way to do an effective “Before and After.”
  2. I didn’t use the FSI deck exclusively. I also used a Cantonese vocabulary deck, the Cantonese conversations at OPLingo (fantastic resource, try it for sure), Peppa Pig in Cantonese and a bunch of other resources. After all it took months to complete the FSI deck, so it didn’t make sense to stick to one resource exclusively.
  3. The FSI Cantonese Anki deck is pretty basic. I’ve been studying the language long enough that most of it was old-hat in terms of vocabulary and structure.

So while I do feel I improved a bit in Cantonese listening comprehension and reading comprehension last year, I can’t give the FSI Cantonese deck any solo credit for helping me get better. I will say three things though.

  1. It’s a good resource for reading written Cantonese. I’ve lost track of the number of materials I’ve seen with Mandarin/Standard Chinese subtitles or text. That’s how it’s done on a native level, but it’s not helpful for beginners at all. I mean eventually you’ll have to adapt to listening in one language and reading in another, but in the early stages, a pure Cantonese resource is great.
  2. It’s also a good resource for understanding Cantonese spoken at close to regular speed. There’s a good mix of both men and women chatting about a variety of everyday topics without making the dialogues feel excessively “manufactured.” Though the conversations never really “go” anywhere. They’re just snippets, so if you want full conversations, check the OPLingo site I linked earlier.
  3. There still aren’t many Cantonese materials aimed at the intermediate-to-advanced learner. And especially not those that include both audio and an accurate text transcript. And doubly-especially not free and still available. So there’s no reason not to use this deck if you can find it.

Here is the Anki link. As I often say for Cantonese, you don’t exactly have a lot of options, so you might as well take what you can get.

In contrast, I just picked up a couple of good Korean decks because I’ve almost exhausted all of Evita’s decks and finished the Hanja deck as well. I’ve had so little to review lately that I’ve been doing more and more of the Spoonfed Chinese deck I said I was putting on hold. But that changes today. Back to learning more Korean so I can read promising series like “The Emperor Reverses Time” and “The Villainess is a Marionette” without having to deal with scanlation drama. See ya!

 

Spoonfed Chinese experiment on hold

You may remember I said two months ago that I was going to try learning Mandarin Chinese with the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck and very little else. If you don’t remember, refer to that post here. I said I would provide an update every 10% of the way, which is approximately how far I’ve gotten with it now. However I’m going to have to put the experiment on hold for a very simple reason:

Mandarin is interfering with my Cantonese.

The two languages have some significant differences, but they’re ultimately very, very similar. This will be great for me when I finally get round to learning Mandarin seriously, but right now my Cantonese isn’t quite good enough yet.

I’m just stepping into Advanced now and picking up more key vocabulary. When I learn to pronounce something one way in Cantonese, then right away step into the Spoonfed deck and learn to say it a different way, it honestly messes with my head. The net result is I don’t learn it in either language. With enough repetition it sticks eventually, but it’s frustrating and makes me dread learning instead of look forward to it.

All hope is not lost, though. I don’t want to lose the gains I’ve made with Mandarin so far, so I’m going to set the deck to give me only 1 new card ever day. That way I still get to revise what I know already, and still continue to learn at a drastically reduced rate.

Eventually, once I consider myself proficient in Cantonese, I’ll be able to return with more seriousness. It will be like my Japanese levels, where I can comfortably read 結果 as “kekka” in Japanese and as “gitgwo” in Cantonese without any problems. I’ve heard of people working on both Mandarin and Cantonese at the same time, but I don’t have the background they do (or the resilience and intelligence, shrug) so I’m not going to force myself.

Brief comment on the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck though: it’s really good. Some might consider it repetitive, but it’s great for me. It gives a new vocabulary item, hammers it in with some examples, then moves on to the next item. And it frequently incorporates other things you’ve learned in the past so you don’t forget them. You’ll just be building your Chinese reading skills brick by brick, sentence by sentence. And speaking skills too, if you did like I did and sounded each sentence out loud.

Aahm, yum yum yum

So if you’re learning just Mandarin or if you’re made of sterner stuff than me, I recommend it all the way. Other languages have sentence decks as well, but at least for Cantonese and Korean I haven’t seen anything as systematic and easy to follow. That’s all the more reason why I don’t want to quit entirely but merely sloooow down to a crawl for now.

Any Cantonese progress?

Things are looking up on the Cantonese front. I recently found a great tool which is just what I need to push me over the Intermediate plateau. It’s the Reading tool on Languages.io, specifically the Cantonese Conversations course. 100 native-level conversations with full audio and written Cantonese. Amazing! I’ll write a fuller report once I’ve fooled around with it a little more, but I’m seeing great progress already just from listening to each one. There is light at the end of the Cantonese tunnel at last!

Finished the (No Typing) Essential Cantonese Vocabulary course on Memrise

Where “finished” means I did half the course, because the other half is the same sentences or words, just with the card reversed. (No Typing) Essential Cantonese Vocabulary is a fully-voiced audio course on Memrise which takes you from “Hello” to long advertising slogans and tongue-twisters which aren’t exactly essential but are fun to learn.

As a Cantonese learner who has been stuck at intermediate for years and is now trying to break through to the advanced level, what I need most is vocabulary and native-level audio and video input. While the speech in this course is a little slower and a lot clearer than what you’ll hear people on Hong Kong radio, TV and Youtube speaking, it’s still enough to be a good reference and you will hear much of the vocab being used on an everyday basis.

I’d say it’s a really good course for those on the beginner-to-intermediate level, but after that what you really need is just regular native conversation from regular native content. At the very least you should move on to natural content for children like Peppa Pig in Cantonese on Youtube (download it ASAP before it gets taken down).

However, it’s still a worthwhile experience when you’ve just reached intermediate, because you will inevitably have some gaps in your vocabulary. For example, I didn’t know all the parts of the body, I didn’t know the names of some clothing items like scarves and high heels, common food ingredients like oyster sauce and hoisin sauce, etc.

And getting more sentence practice while I was at it was a good thing as well. Memrise works by repeated words and phrases over and over again until they’re burned into your brain, so my recall of the stuff I learned is really high.

If I had to criticize the Essential Cantonese Vocabulary it would be for two things. Firstly, half the deck is wasted on repeats, so it’s really only about 900 cards instead of almost 2000 like you might first expect. And secondly there are a few mistakes that haven’t been fixed despite being pointed out ages ago, probably because the deck is no longer being maintained.

But those are just minor criticisms. If you’ve finished the usual gauntlet of basic textbooks like “Teach Yourself Cantonese” and Youtube videos and you’re still feeling a bit weak in terms of everyday vocabulary, this is a good place to fill in some gaps, refresh your memory or cement what you’ve learned into your brain.

In any case, there are very few intermediate or advanced Memrise Cantonese courses that take you past the basic level and have both Cantonese characters (not jyutping! say no to romanization once you’re past the beginner level!) and quality audio. Apart from this one, I only know of Intermediate Cantonese w Audio, mostly taken from Adamn Sheik’s Cantonese website and Cantonese through Song, now sadly abandoned.

So if you use Memrise and you’re learning Cantonese, this is one of the few options you’ve got, so have at it!

For me, my next step is to move on to native Hong Kong dramas and TV shows with Chinese subtitles, not English. I tested myself briefly with an episode of Wong Fei Hung and realized I could understand about 80% of what was happening as long as I checked the subs. For now I will work through all the Cantonese Peppa Pig episodes on YouTube while searching for Cantonese (not “written Chinese”) subtitles. I’ll share any findings I make here so fellow learners can benefit. See you in a bit~.

 

Korean and Cantonese language goals for 2020!

It’s January, a time when everyone sets goals for learning and self-improvement! So I’m also jumping on the bandwagon…

…Or that was the plan, but I realize I don’t have any serious plans for Cantonese lately. I’ve realized my stumbling block is the inability to make the transition from manufactured dialogues meant for learners to actual native-speaker material. In every language there’s a gap between the written language and the spoken one. But in Cantonese it’s even worse because they’re two different languages.

Last year, I looked around online to try and find a solution. Something to help me cross the intermediate plateau I’d reached. My research led me to two learning packages that people have offered for sale that feature just that kind of native Cantonese material, but I didn’t act on it and then I lost the links.

Cantonese Goal:

Sometime in 2020, track those packages down and give them a try to see if they can help me understand native material better. My long-term goal for the language isn’t complicated. I just want to be able to follow the occasional movie, Hong Kong drama and cooking/variety show online.

Korean Goal:

Long-term, I want to be able to read raw manhwa. That’s it. I’m not that into K-dramas, and anything that’s good will be immediately subbed anyway.

As I mentioned in my last post on learning Korean, I need to work hard on my grammar. Vocabulary is coming along well thanks to Memrise and other sources, but just knowing words isn’t enough. From now till the end of April, my goal is to make it through the extremely boring but helpful Korean Culture Series & Quick Korean lessons on Youtube. I only have 66 lessons left to go, so I could be done by early March if I did a lesson a day.

Once I get those done, I will return with updated goals for the language. Korean is going to be a bigger focus than Cantonese, mostly because there are far more free and useful resources out there so it’s an easier process. See you in a couple of months with an update, God willing!

Watched Kung Fu Cult Master (Jet Li movie)

Watched it in Cantonese, of course. But with subtitles because Kung Fu Cult Master (a.k.a. Evil Cult a.k.a Lord of Wu Tang) is one of my favorite kung fu movies of all time and I can’t bear to not understand a single line. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

Summary: Two different schools of kung fu fight for possession of two magic swords that will let the owner know all martial-arts secrets. Young Chang Mo-kei (Jet Li) is caught between the two but is unable to do anything because he suffers from a curse that prevents him from practicing kung fu. All that changes with an invitation from an alluring young woman one sultry evening…

Don’t worry, nothing happens with the alluring young woman. And in fact the “nothing happens” sends Mo-kei into a rage that drives him off a cliff and into the lair of the only man who can cure his curse. The movie kicks into super-overdrive from that point and doesn’t let up until the rather unsatisfying ending.

Best features: I don’t think too much of Jet Li as an actor, but as a martial artist he’s always a delight to watch. His actions are crisp, fluid and logical. Everything moves smoothly from one attack to the next. Even when he’s firing off balls of light you get the sense it’s the most practical option at the time. And it’s not just him but all the other battles are well-choreographed and easy to follow, even the ones featuring what look like thousands of extras on the screen.

It may also be because I’ve watched this at least 3 times, but I found the story easy to follow despite the sheer number of players. It’s easiest to divide them into two broad groups and remember that the people you spend the most time hanging with are the Shaolin coalition and that the really bad guys are the Yuen government’s dogs.

There’s good chemistry between Chang Mo-kei and his leading ladies, especially between him and the coquettish Chao Min, played by Sharla “Yee Mong” Cheung. You really want to punch her in the face, but at the same time you can’t help admiring her chutzpah. In a world of overpowered martial artists, it’s admirable to have a character who makes her way around with  her wits and an understanding of human nature.

There are also a lot of cute moments between Mo-kei and his servant Siu Chiu as well, making you wonder what secret she’s harboring and if they’ll ever get together one day. I always did like Chingmy Yau’s characters. It’s too bad all three lead actresses in this movie have retired now.

Stuff that’s not so good: The lack of a conclusive ending. This is clearly part 1 of two or even three, but the film was such a bomb (unbelievable!!) and apparently Li had issues with the director, so the promised sequel never came out. Since the story is based on Jin Yong’s Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre, I know what drama I’m watching next!

The other negative is the juvenile sexual humor and a bit of bad language – from a bad character, but nevertheless. It’s only in a few brief scenes and not enough to detract from the rest of the movie as a whole, but I include it for the sake of completeness.

I should also say that the story might be a bit confusing if it’s your first time watching. There are so many faction names thrown about that it can be hard to follow. Especially for characters who are mentioned but don’t show up. I also expected some explanation for why Jet Li’s mother and Chao Min are played by the same actress (long lost relatives?) but got nothing.

Overall: Lots of great kung fu action. If you like wire-fu, you should definitely watch Kung Fu Cult Master. Great story once you get the hang of it. Very cheesy, but in a feel-good way. Highly recommended