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The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

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Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#41

Post by qazxcvbnm »

fearedbliss wrote: post #35
gfaure wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this instance Standard Chinese or any sort of literary pronunciation is essentially useless to me since people aren't speaking that way Thank you for creating this! But I'm afraid this is the misunderstanding -- words like san1 cing2 申請 are very much everyday words, even though the reading of the character is deemed literary. You should think of characters like 請 and 聽 as just having multiple in-context pronunci…

Definitely. I'm not saying the word 申請 itself isn't used in normal speech, but more that the pronunciation of 請 in normal speech would sound more like an e. So I would rather teach people the normal way people would pronounce words and not the literary form, since as I said before, I also do want to stay away from Standard Chinese as much as possible and teach Written Cantonese. It will take me some time to continue…

As a native speaker I assure you that 請 is pronounced differently in context, and that both readings are perfectly Cantonese.

For a more clear example, see 平: 大平賣 ("vernacular" reading; peng4) (lit. big cheap sale; i.e. sale) vs 平面 ("literary" reading; ping4) (lit. flat surface; i.e. surface). peng4 is the "vernacular" reading but used exclusively for meaning cheap. ping4 is "literary" but used everywhere else. "vernacular" versus "literary" is a linguistic classification, but do not necessarily represent either being more common than the other reading. Both readings exist.

Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#42

Post by qazxcvbnm »

fearedbliss wrote: post #32
k_sze wrote: post #27

Right off the bat, 小念頭, siu2 lim6 tau4 seems to be incorrectly romanized. 念 should be nim6, not lim6. lim6 is what we call 懶音 (literally "lazy pronunciation"). The statement that "Cantonese has no formal standardization for its phonetic and writing systems" deserves a better explanation. There are in fact multiple standards, as can be seen on the website of the Multi-function Chinese Character Database developed by t…

I'm aware of this and I've made a conscious decision to use the lazy pronunciation. I'm actually thinking of switching to lazy pronunciation as the standard pronunciation for a lot of words, the same as what some authors have done. It's more difficult and weird to teach people a pronunciation that not many people are using. At this point the lazy pronunciation has pretty much dominated the normal language development…

I cannot corroborate the experience of the other commenter. 念 is very definitively nim6, with lim6 as a common variant/lazy pronunciation. It is not at all uncommon that words have a variant pronunciation when used in certain contexts (e.g. as jargon or slang), such as Wing Chun in your case, but the word itself is certainly not properly or even commonly pronounced the "lazy" way otherwise (c.f. 執念 zap1nim6; 萬念俱灰 maan6nim6keoi1fui1; 惡念 ok3nim6).

There are many cases where variant pronunciations sound natural, but (individually) "correct" pronunciations sound unnatural (e.g. 土瓜灣 tou2gwaa1waan1 "correct" but unnatural, tou2gwaa1waan4 "variant" and natural). I have never encountered a case where a correct pronunciation would be unnatural where "lazy" pronunciations would be natural.

On another note, your Cantonese sounds a bit unnatural (without many of the connecting words between thoughts) (typical for learners). A more natural phrasing might be something like this: 我打詠春嘅。學院(?)入面我師父同我哋都係讀lim嘅。反而如果有人讀nim會好奇怪。我想你明白粵卷唔使百分百啱晒嘅。講嘢可能淨係使啱八成到九成，大部份人都明你講嘅嘢。咁都OK嘅。學廣東話嘅學生可以多啲地方繼續學廣東話就可以越來越好。

A few notes on your usage:

"我都打詠春" 都 here seems unnecessary, as you have not discussed 詠春 previously.

"學院" slightly dubious, usually used for more academic purposes. For martial arts, 館 or 武館 may be more typical, but I suppose it is possible that your school brands itself as 學院.

"我師傅" "師傅" and "師父" sound the same, but mean quite different things. 師傅 is a polite name for someone working in some field, but 師父 is your master. (In fact this is another example of "lazy" or variant pronunciations, which is emphatically not always the correct pronunciation; 父 here is fu2, but by itself is definitively fu6)

"都話"lim"" "話" probably refers more to the topic of what someone says rather than the pronunciation, which the word "讀" would make clear, that we discuss pronunciation

"我推介你試吓明粵卷唔使係一百%啱" too be honest I'm not completely sure what this sentence means. I hope what I put was what you intended.

"一百%" 百分百 is more natural

"八十到九十%" 八成到九成 (lit. 8 10%s to 9 10%s) is more natural

"明你講乜嘢" (sounds like: understand what on earth you're saying) "乜嘢" emphasises the object like a question (i.e. sounds like a rhetorical question; when not a question, usually would be used when expressing frustration/complaining/scolding); no need to emphasise, "明你講嘅嘢" would be fine.

"學生可以繼續學廣東話。越來越好。" disjointed sentences, not completely sure your intended meaning. I hope what I put was what you intended.

Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#43

Post by inkyoto »

awongh wrote: post #19
koshergweilo wrote: post #18

This is awesome, there aren't many good resources to learn Cantonese, especially compared to Mandarin

It's crazy that in some ways cantonese is a dying language, or at least one that's being sidelined by the government, esp. as Hong Kong is being fully transitioned back to China. But just as many people speak cantonese as speak italian.

Cantonese is hardly a dying language as there are approximately 110 million native speakers of Cantonese across Southern China, South East Asia and Malaysia. Its status in Hong Kong, on the other hand, is indeed changing due to the HK government having to appease to the central government.

But just like most people in Gwong Dung learn to speak Cantonese as their first language despite having to speak the national language (Mandarin) too, the same will continue in Hong Kong as well. There is just too much history and cultural legacy associated with Cantonese that will keep the language going strong for generations to come, 咁…加油啦！

Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#44

Post by Arn_Thor »

k_sze wrote: post #27

Right off the bat, 小念頭, siu2 lim6 tau4 seems to be incorrectly romanized. 念 should be nim6, not lim6. lim6 is what we call 懶音 (literally "lazy pronunciation"). The statement that "Cantonese has no formal standardization for its phonetic and writing systems" deserves a better explanation. There are in fact multiple standards, as can be seen on the website of the Multi-function Chinese Character Database developed by t…

In my 10 years in HK, including months worth of weekly language classes, “n” and “l” were treated utterly interchangeably. Not to say that it’s not worth the effort in some contexts to make a distinction, but if the aim is to get a functional understanding of the language the “lazy” version is useful.

Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#45

Post by fjdjshsh »

qazxcvbnm wrote: post #42
fearedbliss wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of this and I've made a conscious decision to use the lazy pronunciation. I'm actually thinking of switching to lazy pronunciation as the standard pronunciation for a lot of words, the same as what some authors have done. It's more difficult and weird to teach people a pronunciation that not many people are using. At this point the lazy pronunciation has pretty much dominated the normal language development…

I cannot corroborate the experience of the other commenter. 念 is very definitively nim6, with lim6 as a common variant/lazy pronunciation. It is not at all uncommon that words have a variant pronunciation when used in certain contexts (e.g. as jargon or slang), such as Wing Chun in your case, but the word itself is certainly not properly or even commonly pronounced the "lazy" way otherwise (c.f. 執念 zap1nim6; 萬念俱灰 maa…

Most of these corrections seem stylistic / "I would say it this way to make it clear" rather than actual mistakes.

Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#46

Post by qazxcvbnm »

fjdjshsh wrote: post #45
qazxcvbnm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot corroborate the experience of the other commenter. 念 is very definitively nim6, with lim6 as a common variant/lazy pronunciation. It is not at all uncommon that words have a variant pronunciation when used in certain contexts (e.g. as jargon or slang), such as Wing Chun in your case, but the word itself is certainly not properly or even commonly pronounced the "lazy" way otherwise (c.f. 執念 zap1nim6; 萬念俱灰 maa…

Most of these corrections seem stylistic / "I would say it this way to make it clear" rather than actual mistakes.

Yes, I have mainly put awkward usages in the latter section, which will hopefully be useful to the author. If you compare the paragraphs, the outright grammatical problems I simply fixed. The author’s language is definitely comprehensible to a patient listener, but it can be much better still.

Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#47

Post by fearedbliss »

dbtc wrote: post #39
fearedbliss wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. I have actually and was recently playing around with that. The problem isn't necessarily the recordings (since I've accepted that I'm willing to record all the possible Cantonese sounds for all the words myself - I'm not a fan of AI and I don't use it in my personal life if I can avoid it), but more because of the nature of the project. I haven't figured out a way to be able to get the base directory o…

You couldn't just have an 'audio' folder next to 'dungeons'?

Hey @dbtc, I did think about doing this but originally decided to try and find another solution. Reason being that atm my current directory structure is nested (with a variable length of nesting), and I also wanted to be able to use the audio files from anywhere in the app, which means outside of the dungeons directory. But you bringing it up again makes me think if I'm realistically going to be using them outside of the dungeons either way. Also, even if the main folder containing the audio files is called something else, as long as I have a flatter directory structure, I can make it work. I'll consider a flatter more predicable approach since having the audio files for each word is much more beneficial than not.

Thank you!

Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#48

Post by fearedbliss »

inkyoto wrote: post #43
awongh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy that in some ways cantonese is a dying language, or at least one that's being sidelined by the government, esp. as Hong Kong is being fully transitioned back to China. But just as many people speak cantonese as speak italian.

Cantonese is hardly a dying language as there are approximately 110 million native speakers of Cantonese across Southern China, South East Asia and Malaysia. Its status in Hong Kong, on the other hand, is indeed changing due to the HK government having to appease to the central government. But just like most people in Gwong Dung learn to speak Cantonese as their first language despite having to speak the national lan…

Cantonese has no:

- Standard

- Country that speaks it (only Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, and the Overseas Diaspora speak it).

- Learners of the language are primarily within the above territories and learn it through exposure, not through actual proper education in Cantonese itself. But rather learn Standard Chinese writing in school, and just "auto-translate" to Cantonese in their mind. I would even say most Cantonese people don't know how to write Cantonese given the "defaulting to Standard Chinese". A lot of the times when I ask a Cantonese speaker how to write something in Cantonese, they don't know. This is due to many reasons which I won't elaborate atm in order to not make this post longer than what it already is. While this is good in "getting away with being able to write Chinese and communicate with the broader Chinese speaking world", it is not good for Cantonese itself. This is why we have so many words in Cantonese that don't even have a character. It also explains why eventually people did want to create more and more characters and luckily we were at least able to get the Hong Kong Supplementary Set standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Supplementary_Charac...

There has never been a point in Chinese history where the Chinese government has had this much power, and we already have plenty of evidence that they suppress and would like to eliminate the language from existence, and create their own view of what a "Chinese Person" and "Chinese Identity" is. Furthermore, we've already lost and mostly lost a lot of other Chinese languages. Hakka being one of them. It would be extremely difficult to find a Hakka speaker and Hakka learning resources at this point in time.

My time line for when Cantonese will die is far into the future, outside of my life time. But I would put it within the next 300-500 years or lower. Given this context, it is better to start the preservation and education efforts as early as possible.

I'm not expecting you to agree with me, but I wanted to give you some context. I'm not alone in my views.

Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#49

Post by fearedbliss »

qazxcvbnm wrote: post #46
fjdjshsh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these corrections seem stylistic / "I would say it this way to make it clear" rather than actual mistakes.

Yes, I have mainly put awkward usages in the latter section, which will hopefully be useful to the author. If you compare the paragraphs, the outright grammatical problems I simply fixed. The author’s language is definitely comprehensible to a patient listener, but it can be much better still.

Thank you for the corrections, I definitely agree that while I've learned a lot of Cantonese in the past 11 years, I still have a long way to go and loving the process. Given that Cantonese is my third language (I've studied a bunch of other languages, but Cantonese is third language I'm actually specializing in for personal reasons), it makes sense that it sounds unnatural, at least for now. For a portion of it I do agree with the other commenter that it is a stylistic choice. The % part is just me using what's already popular in Cantonese speaking which is to use the "pou-cent" type of style rather than the more traditional way. You are right regarding 學院, my school advertises itself in this way hence my usage of it ;D. But overall, you got what I was trying to say which is the most important part of the process, I'll continue to improve over time :).

Re: The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG

#50

Post by qazxcvbnm »

Arn_Thor wrote: post #44
k_sze wrote: post #27

Right off the bat, 小念頭, siu2 lim6 tau4 seems to be incorrectly romanized. 念 should be nim6, not lim6. lim6 is what we call 懶音 (literally "lazy pronunciation"). The statement that "Cantonese has no formal standardization for its phonetic and writing systems" deserves a better explanation. There are in fact multiple standards, as can be seen on the website of the Multi-function Chinese Character Database developed by t…

In my 10 years in HK, including months worth of weekly language classes, “n” and “l” were treated utterly interchangeably. Not to say that it’s not worth the effort in some contexts to make a distinction, but if the aim is to get a functional understanding of the language the “lazy” version is useful.

A counterexample for you: 聶 nip6, never lip6. 獵 lip6, never nip6. 焫 naat3, "lazily" laat3. 辣 laat6, never naat6. (Yes, almost everywhere interchangeable)
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