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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#71

Post by orm »

lumb63 wrote: post #39

My girlfriend’s family strictly speaks Cantonese and I known nothing about it. I was just talking with a friend in a similar situation who lamented the lack of resources for Cantonese. This is awesome! Does anyone have any other hidden-gem Cantonese learning resources?

If you have basic Mandarin knowledge, you could try Duolingo's Cantonese course for Mandarin speakers. I think it is helpful to get familiar with how words are pronounced and what expressions people use in vernacular Cantonese so far. As with the Mandarin course, there is little explanation, you kind of have to complement it eg with some drilling for tones.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#72

Post by orm »

Does anyone know of good tools to practice tone-listening and recognition for cantonese? or tools for drilling jyutping more generally,

I've used https://chaaklau.github.io/cantorocks/, but I would like to also try others, as the audio is not great sometimes and I'd like to listen to different voices.

When studying Mandarin I found that getting the phonetics right early on really helped me, it can be done in a relatively short time and its hugely motivating.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#73

Post by panabee »

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…

consolidating other resource links from the thread:

* jyutpin typing game https://chaaklau.github.io/cantorocks/

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#74

Post by keyboard_smash »

donatj wrote: post #70

I honestly wonder how good of a job one could do with Chinese at making a font that just translated each character into English? Especially given modern font ligatures letting you change the meanings displayed based on context (the way things like Fira code do). Maybe don't even show the Chinese characters, just their meaning in English? It's obviously not going to be perfect, but I think there's potential there for…

Like with any language, there’s gonna be a lot of context-dependent words/phrases with multiple meanings that are hard to segment/parse/translate correctly. Things like DeepL or GTranslate take into account probabilities for segmentation and grammar (or use ICU libraries); but that’s harder to do from a context of using ligatures and basic font engine features.

e.g. The classic example is 大麻煩 - is it 大|麻煩 (a big inconvenience), or is it 大麻|煩 (marijuana annoyance)? Is 粉絲 fan, or vermicelli? Is 早唞！ “good night!” or “go fuck yourself!”?

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#75

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

donatj wrote: post #70

I honestly wonder how good of a job one could do with Chinese at making a font that just translated each character into English? Especially given modern font ligatures letting you change the meanings displayed based on context (the way things like Fira code do). Maybe don't even show the Chinese characters, just their meaning in English? It's obviously not going to be perfect, but I think there's potential there for…

Iirc, opentype font tables are Turing complete so... you could put an AI translator in a font! The sky's the limit.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#76

Post by keyboard_smash »

orm wrote: post #72

Does anyone know of good tools to practice tone-listening and recognition for cantonese? or tools for drilling jyutping more generally, I've used https://chaaklau.github.io/cantorocks/ , but I would like to also try others, as the audio is not great sometimes and I'd like to listen to different voices. When studying Mandarin I found that getting the phonetics right early on really helped me, it can be done in a relat…

Somebody made this app[1][2][3] for practicing tones in Cantonese.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/xx5g39/cantone_an_...

[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cantone/id1602297692

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cantone.ca...

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#77

Post by dumbotron »

teleforce wrote: post #16

As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages and the meaning of words are depending on how you speak the syllables inside the words. Mandarin has four, Thai has five, Cantonese has six and Vitnamese has six tones. Overall about 20% or 1.5 billion of the world's population converse daily in tonal languages. It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection…

I got curious about something with tonal languages: how are song melodies written for them. For some, the melody matched the tones of the word. Then there's Mandarin. Mandarin just follows the melody, and you can figure out the word by context. As an English speaker, this makes ~cents~ sense. Homophones aren't a big deal. If Mandarin doesn't need tones in lyrics, why does it need them normally?

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#78

Post by eloisius »

donatj wrote: post #70

I honestly wonder how good of a job one could do with Chinese at making a font that just translated each character into English? Especially given modern font ligatures letting you change the meanings displayed based on context (the way things like Fira code do). Maybe don't even show the Chinese characters, just their meaning in English? It's obviously not going to be perfect, but I think there's potential there for…

Short answer is horribly. Chinese is not one word per character. Not even close. Most words you encounter on a regular basis are two-char compounds, but individually each character would tell you less about the whole than ‘camp’ and ‘ground.’ Many words are four-char compounds.

You could potentially design ligatures for every word in the dictionary, but given the vastly different grammar, you wouldn’t be able to understand what a sentence said. You might be able to glean ‘this sentence involves a dog.’ Even google translate makes such poor translations, that it can really only assist in understanding. It usually doesn’t understand the subject of the sentence and confuses all the pronounced into ‘I.’

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#79

Post by dumbotron »

postcynical wrote: post #19
teleforce wrote: post #16

As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages and the meaning of words are depending on how you speak the syllables inside the words. Mandarin has four, Thai has five, Cantonese has six and Vitnamese has six tones. Overall about 20% or 1.5 billion of the world's population converse daily in tonal languages. It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection…

The annnoying part in written thai is thattherearenospacesbetweenwords.

Hence expertsexchange.com

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#80

Post by dumbotron »

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…

> As an English native speaker who learned Mandarin, I really didn't find the lack of spaces harmful to learning the language.

Definitely. The logograms and being in a completely different language family are the real hurdles.

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