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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#171

Post by peterfirefly »

lordnacho wrote: post #145
panabee wrote: post #31

this is awesome. thanks for sharing. there is a wealth of resources for learning mandarin but only a smattering for cantonese. two favorites: 1. web dictionary http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordsearch.php?leve... 2. iOS dictionary that is free and comprehensive, also covers mandarin: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pleco-chinese-dictionary/id341... unaffiliated with either company, just a longtime user. othe…

What I'm after is a resource for learning mandarin of you're already a speaker of Cantonese. I've found it surprisingly hard to find a summary of the differences. By contrast learning German from Danish seemed to have some bits that made it clear reasonably fast.

If you can read hanzi, can't you just start reading whatever you want in Mandarin? Obviously starting with something easy and then moving on to harder and harder texts, of course.

And can't you just start watching TV shows and movies in Mandarin? It should be a lot easier than for us mortals who start out without knowing any Sinitic languages. We have to work hard just to handle the tones and the near total lack of shared vocabulary.

I am puzzled that learning Mandarin for you hasn't gone much the same way as learning German did.

There is of course the standard way of playing with HelloChinese (or similar apps) and LingQ/Du Chinese (or similar apps) + reading easy readers (Mandarin Companion, Chinese Breeze, and similar). You should be able to speedrun them, compared to the long slog path that we mortals have to take.

(A fellow Dane with zero East Asian parentage.)

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#172

Post by tikkabhuna »

jkwchui wrote: post #169
tikkabhuna wrote: post #164

Happy to see this here. I think there's tons of potential for making Cantonese easier to learn. The big difficulties I've had as an English speaker learning is: 1. Multiple Romanisation formats (Jyutping vs Yale) 2. Many community lead dictionaries with varying completeness. 3. Many web resources for learning words/phrases/etc use a mixture of traditional characters, jyutping, yale, or something else. Its very diffic…

(Font author here) I whole-heartedly agree. I am a native speaker, and "fluent" in jyutping, yet I have such a hard time with Yale. One service I'm going to build is a mapping tool between {R1, R2, ...Rn} and {G1, G2, ...Gn} where R is romanization method and G are y/z-variants of glyphs. (These, for the most part, already exists inside packages I built for building the font, and just need to have an UI to expose it…

I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps creating an API around PyCantonese?

My thought is that if there's a common data format for a Cantonese sentence with jyutping/yale/traditional + translation(s), the user could then pick what to display.

It could then also be worked into games/learning exercises. Placeholders could be made with a number of options so users could learn how to slot different adjectives into sentences, for example.

(I have the same username on Reddit, by the way. Sorry I never got to test it out for you!)

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#173

Post by hibbelig »

zdragnar wrote: post #30
xvilka wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with Chinese language, thus lexing and parsing requires knowing many more words than in languages with spaces between words.

As an English native speaker who learned Mandarin, I really didn't find the lack of spaces harmful to learning the language. Since each character represents a syllable, rather than a specific sound, and the written language is essentially not phonetic, reading the characters is an entirely different experience. OTOH, you have English and German and others that frequently use compound words, and the use of spaces beco…

> OTOH, you have English and German and others that frequently use compound words, and the use of spaces becomes really important to understanding the writing.

Schleifmaschinenverleih would like to have a word with you.

This is parsed as Schleif-Maschinen-Verleih. Verleih means a rental company. The middle one is machine, and the first one I find both sanding and whetting as translations, not sure which one it is. So you can rent sanding and/or whetting machines there.

There are cases where it's ambiguous but for the most part the lack of spaces in compound nouns in German is not an issue.

A somewhat infamous example is Rohrohrzucker which should be parsed as Roh-Rohr-Zucker (raw cane sugar), but Rohr-Ohr-Zucker is also possible (pipe ear sugar). It's pretty clear when it happens that you got the wrong parsing but it takes a while to figure out what the right parsing is :-)

As far as speaking is concerned: I guess the extra spaces in English don't necessarily translate to pauses, do they? Is plugin pronounced differently from plug-in due to the hyphen?

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#174

Post by faitswulff »

dontlaugh wrote: post #139
throwaway2037 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last point: I would say that is generally true for all native-level speakers of tonal languages. It is interesting to watch them try to learn a different tonal language. It suddenly opens all these doors into their own language. "Oh, so that's why foreigners struggle with this sound." Mandarin: zai, sai, cai When you read about tonal languages online, there is so much emphasis on "tonal languages are special". I…

It even matters in Latin languages somewhat. Which syllable is stressed can change meaning, sometimes avoiding ambiguity.

Exactly. I use the example of different tones when saying “really.” It can have very different connotations depending on the tone from questioning to sarcastic.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#175

Post by carlmr »

dontlaugh wrote: post #139
throwaway2037 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last point: I would say that is generally true for all native-level speakers of tonal languages. It is interesting to watch them try to learn a different tonal language. It suddenly opens all these doors into their own language. "Oh, so that's why foreigners struggle with this sound." Mandarin: zai, sai, cai When you read about tonal languages online, there is so much emphasis on "tonal languages are special". I…

It even matters in Latin languages somewhat. Which syllable is stressed can change meaning, sometimes avoiding ambiguity.

Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. have per-syllable tones. English, German, French and probably many more, have per-partial-sentence tones.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#176

Post by throwaway2037 »

hnfong wrote: post #109
throwaway2037 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many (modern, written) "ideographic languages" exist? I can think of two: Chinese and Japanese. Old Korean and Vietnamese used some Chinese characters, but the modern languages use none. It is interesting to me when written Chinese and Japanese use commas. It is pretty much never required, but pure style. It does help to breakup a complex sentence, similar to phonetic languages.

Comma is required in modern Chinese. Nobody will bother reading your text if you don't at least put some of them in the right places... (I don't know Japanese so I can't speak to that)

Nice post. Can you give a simple example sentence where it is required? (I believe you.) I studied Mandarin and Cantonese for a few years, but I never got the level where I thought commas were required.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#177

Post by throwaway2037 »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #132
throwaway2037 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many (modern, written) "ideographic languages" exist? I can think of two: Chinese and Japanese. Old Korean and Vietnamese used some Chinese characters, but the modern languages use none. It is interesting to me when written Chinese and Japanese use commas. It is pretty much never required, but pure style. It does help to breakup a complex sentence, similar to phonetic languages.

Japanese has a lot of “hint” on word (nouns) ending. And they use “full stop” plus one space to end a sentence as comma is not really needed in most cases. This is unlike chinese.

    Japanese has a lot of “hint” on word (nouns) ending.
Can you give a simple example sentence to demonstrate your point? (I believe you.)

    This is unlike [C]hinese.
Can you give a simple example sentence to demonstrate your point? (I believe you.)

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#178

Post by ddeck »

mchaver wrote: post #160
ddeck wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It needs them because there are too few unique syllables in Mandarin. I'm sure a linguist can provide the proper terminology, but there are only around 400 unique sounds in Mandarin, ignoring tones. Even adding five tones still only increases this to ~1500 (not all are used). Compare this to English, where estimates are in the 10-15k range. There are therefore an enormous number of homophones in Mandarin, which makes…

There are language with even smaller sets of unique sounds that do not have tones like Hawaiian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_phonology There are many common homophones in English that are distinguished by context. Conversation tends to have a lot of context. As a Mandarin speaker, I've never really experienced this context problem. You can make up some artificial examples in English and Chinese but they do…

I'm surprised you've never experienced this. Even names often require an explanation, because the pronunciation is insufficient to convey which words (i.e. characters) are used.

>Mandarin can be written phonetically perfectly fine

It can, and I use hanyu pinyin daily, but my point is that given the small space of possible sounds, it often has a great deal of ambiguity, and is mentally taxing to read. Have you ever tried reading an essay or book in pinyin? With syllabic spacing? There will be many places where it is simply not possible to know for certain what a particular word is. And then there are text books, scientific books.

Chinese characters do indeed have strong historical and cultural value, but that is not why they are still around. They are still around because they are essential to the written language.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#179

Post by adastra22 »

deadfoxygrandpa wrote: post #153
hnfong wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it really depends on "dialect". Try that with Cantonese :) As mentioned in another comment, single syllable words are much more common in Cantonese, and word combinations are much more "free" in the sense that there are a lot more ambiguity as to what counts as a "word" and what is merely two single-character-words idiomatically used together. There are also cases where grammatical constructs (and also foul w…

i think you're on to something about cantonese, but it's also true of mandarin. segmentation of words in chinese in general seems inherently messier than segmentation in english. also look at stuff like abbreviations: is 北大 one word? is it an abbreviation for 北京大学 the same way Caltech is an abbreviation for california institute of technology? is it just two single character words, each of which is an abbreviation? i…

The same problem exists in Japanese FWIW, whose speakers like to make the same sorts of abbreviations despite not having a bisyllabic meter like Mandarin does. Japanese is somewhat helped by having multiple orthographies, however.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#180

Post by ackfoobar »

Umofomia wrote: post #15
ghayes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, Mandarin doesn't have multiple pronunciations for the same character-- does Cantonese? Aside of that, you could use ligatures for that, couldn't you?

Mandarin definitely has many characters with multiple pronunciations. One large class come from literary vs. colloquial reading differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readin... Another large class class comes from vestiges of derivational morphology in Old Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph#In_Chinese For instance, the character 度 in modern Mandarin can be pronounced dù (when…

For the example you give, in Cantonese they're dou6 and dok6, respectively.

The 3/6 tones in Cantonese and ˋ (4th, falling tone) in Mandarin are the "departing" tone, which comes from the departing tone in Middle Chinese, which I believe comes from the -s ending in Old Chinese.

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