Cantonese Basic $25 off CD version, Levels 1 and 2! | $50 both levels! The Cantonese Basic Coarse is a course in spoken Cantonese, with the subject matter of the course dealing with daily life in Hong Kong. Cantonese is the principal language of Kwangtung province in Southeast China, parts of neighboring Kwangsi province, Hong Kong, and Macao; it is also spoken by many people in Southeast Asia, and is the original language of many Chinese-American, with some 50 million people in the world speaking it. It has many dialects, but the Prestige variety, spoken in Canton, is standard, and is used over a wide area, including Hong Kong, and these audio recordings are made in the Prestige dialect. The course is divided into two levels; each book has a handy glossary presenting a romanization, characters, and a brief definition. It was designed for an intensive language program of 25-30 class hours a week and uses all the basic grammatical structures of the language and a vocabulary of approximately 950 words. There are 30 lessons in the course, and the rate of progress in an intensive course is expected to be approximately 2 lessons per week, including time for review and testing. Level One comes with 14 CDs and a book; Level Two with 15 CDs and a book.
The Cantonese Basic Coarse is a course in spoken Cantonese, with the subject matter of the course dealing with daily life in Hong Kong. Cantonese is the principal language of Kwangtung province in Southeast China, parts of neighboring Kwangsi province, Hong Kong, and Macao; it is also spoken by many people in Southeast Asia, and is the original language of many Chinese-American, with some 50 million people in the world speaking it. It has many dialects, but the Prestige variety, spoken in Canton, is standard, and is used over a wide area, including Hong Kong, and these audio recordings are made in the Prestige dialect.
The course is divided into two levels; each book has a handy glossary presenting a romanization, characters, and a brief definition. It was designed for an intensive language program of 25-30 class hours a week and uses all the basic grammatical structures of the language and a vocabulary of approximately 950 words. There are 30 lessons in the course, and the rate of progress in an intensive course is expected to be approximately 2 lessons per week, including time for review and testing. Level One comes with 14 CDs and a book; Level Two with 15 CDs and a book.
Each lesson contains five sections: I) a Basic Conversation to be memorized; II) Notes; III) Pattern Drills, structural drills of the type in which the speaker's cue is the stimulus for the students' response; IV) Conversations for Listening, a listening comprehension section; and V) Say it in Cantonese: an English to Cantonese practice session, much of it in conversational question-answer form in which students apply what they have learned in the lesson. The early lessons in addition contain explanation and practice drills on pronunciation points, and some standard phrases for the students to learn to respond to when used by the teacher.
The objectives of the course are to teach students to speak Standard Cantonese in the locales where Cantonese is spoken, to speak it fluently and grammatically, with acceptable pronunciation, within the scope of topics of daily life. The course was not designed to lay the groundwork for learning the written language. At the end of the course students will be able to buy things; talk on the telephone; ask and give directions; handle money; discuss events past, present, and future; make comparisons; talk about themselves and their families; tell time; order simple meals; talk with the landlord, doctor, servant, bellboy, cabdriver, waiter, sales-clerk; discuss what, when, where, why, who, how, how much. They will not be able to discuss politics or their jobs or other topics of a specialized nature.
The method underlying these lessons is guided imitation, and the aim is automaticity. Ideally, one will have access to a teacher, who drills on the Cantonese in the text, providing an authentic model for the student to imitate. Statements on how the language is manipulated are included in the explanatory notes in the text, which may be supplemented by further discussions on the part of the teacher. As a supplement to class hours with a teacher, or as a replacement for them, students work with the audio recordings which approximate the classroom situation.
Language learning is over-learning. Through memorization of whole utterances, and substitution within and manipulation of these utterances, a student achieves the fluency and automaticity that are necessary for control of a language. Language learning involves acquiring a new set of habits, and these habits must become automatic. Just as the experienced driver performs the mechanics of driving unconsciously turning on the engine, shifting gears, applying the brakes, etc. and concentrates on where they are going, so the fluent speaker of a language is concerned with what they are saying rather than the mechanics of how they are saying it.
All the conversations and drills in this book were written by native Cantonese speakers working under the direction of an American linguist who specified which grammatical points to cover and what situations were required. The design of the text what to cover, what sequence to use in introducing new material, what limits to set on vocabulary, the write-ups of structure notes, types and layouts of pattern drills, and the contents of the English-to-Chinese translation sections, were done by the American linguist.
What we have done to handle the problem of limited structures and vocabulary is to plan the lessons so that certain topics and forms don't come up until rather late in the course. The words 'yesterday', 'today', and 'tomorrow', for example, don't occur until Lesson 16. Meanwhile the student has built up the grammatical structure and vocabulary to talk fluently on some subjects which don't involve these expressions and the complexities of verb structures that are involved with time-related sentences. For this reason the present text is not appropriate for use of students whose needs are for just a few phrases of Cantonese - it takes too long from that point of view to get to some of the phrases which a tourist, for example, wants to use right away. But the student who can study hard on an intensive program for four months and cover at least 26 of the 30 lessons, will then speak natural-sounding and grammatical Cantonese, and will be able to cope with most daily life situations in the language.
The student should note the following general suggestions and warnings:
Basic Conversation Each lesson begins with a Basic Conversation covering a daily life situation, organized around one or more grammatical points. The conversation is presented first in build-up form, then in recapitulation. The buildup is partly a device to isolate new words and phrases for pronunciation and identification, partly a device to enable students to gain smooth delivery and natural sentence rhythm by starting with a small segment of a sentence then progressively adding to it to build a full sentence.
The recommended procedure for the buildup is as follows: Language learners open their books to the new lesson and look at the English equivalents as the recording voices the Cantonese. The recording voices the first item six times - three times for the learners to listen only, three times for them to repeat after the recording.Then move on to the next item and repeat the same procedure.
In the recapitulation section the conversation is repeated in full sentence form. The recording voices each sentence at least two times, with pauses after each sentence for students to repeat. The first goal is for the students to be able to say the conversation after the recording at natural speed and with natural sentence rhythm. Details of pronunciation are spotlighted in another section - the first goal for the conversation is sentence rhythm and natural speed.
The second goal is for the students to memorize the Basic Conversation, so they can say it independently, maintaining natural speed and rhythm. Students will find the recordings a valuable aid to memorizing; they are tireless in furnishing a model for students to imitate, and enable them to precede at the pace best suited to their needs.
The purpose of memorizing the Basic Conversations is twofold. Memorizing situational material gives students tip-of-the-tongue command of useable Cantonese. Secondly, since the basic conversations are organized on grammatical principles, by memorizing the conversations they will be learning the grammatical framework of the language, on which they can construct other sentences.
Pronunciation Practice In general, the Pronunciation Practices concentrate on giving limited explanation and fuller practice drills on new sounds encountered in a lesson, plus comparison drills with sounds previously learned and sometimes comparisons with American close counterparts. Instead of giving many examples, using items unknown to the students the pronunciation drills stick to examples from material they have met in the Basic Conversation or Pattern Drills. The exception to this is Lesson One, which presents an overview of all the tones, consonant initials, and vocalic finals of the language, in addition to giving an introduction to intonation and stress. Students who absorb pronunciation best through mimicking the model and who find the linguistic description of sounds confusing or boring or both, should concentrate on mimicking the model and skimp or skip the explanations.
Notes There are two kinds of Notes - Structure Notes and Culture Notes.
The Structure Notes summarize the structures used in the Basic Conversations and practiced in the Pattern Drills, and are for those students who want a general explanation of how the language works. The students who absorb language structures better through learning model sentences and drilling variations of the model can concentrate on the Basic Conversations and Pattern Drills, and skimp on the Structure Notes.
The Culture Notes comment on some Cantonese life patterns which differ from our own.
Pattern Drills There are six kinds of Pattern Drills in Cantonese Basic Course. The purpose of the drills is to make the vocabulary and sentence structures sink in and become speech habits, so that the student understands spoken Cantonese without having to translate mentally and speaks fluently and grammatically at natural speed without awkward hesitation and groping for words.
The Pattern Drills give students practice in structures and words which have been introduced in the Basic Conversations. In addition, there are other vocabulary items which appear first in the drill sections. A plus (+) sign marks each occurrence of a new word in this section, and the English equivalent is given.
Each drill begins with an recorded example giving a model of the cue and the student's response. Then there follow 8 to 10 problems to be done on this pattern. The recording gives the cue, and the student responds to the new cue following the pattern set in the example. The response is thus predictable, controlled by the pattern and the cue. In the book the cues are given in the left hand column and the responses on the right, with the example above. A drill is mastered when the student can respond to the cues promptly, smoothly, and without reference to the book.
These types of drills follow:
1. Substitution Drills The recording gives a pattern sentence, and then a word or phrase (called a cue) to be substituted in the original sentence. The student notes the substitution cue and substitutes it in the appropriate place to make a new sentence. R: (for Recording) Good morning, Mrs. Brown. /Jones/ S: (for Student) Hat. . 2. Expansion Drills There are two kinds of expansion drills. One could be called a listen-and-add drill, using vocabulary and structures familiar to the students. The recording gives a word or phrase and the students repeat it. Then the recording gives another word or phrase and the students add that word to the original utterance, expanding it. Then another cue is added, and the students incorporate it, and so on, making each time a progressively longer utterance. R: Hat. S: Hat. R: Blue. S: Blue hat. R: Two. S: Two blue hats. R: Buy. S: Buy two blue hats. This type of expansion drill is handled a little differently if it includes new vocabulary. In that case it is performed as a listen-and-repeat drill, the students echoing the recording: R: Hat. S: Hat. R: Blue hat. S: Blue hat. R: Two blue hats. S: Two blue hats. In the second type of expansion drill the example sentence gives the model to follow and the students expand the subsequent cue sentences according to the pattern set by the example: R: I'm not Mrs. Lee. /Chan/ S: I'm not Mrs. Lee - my name is Chan. 3. Response Drills The response drills involve 1) question stimulus and answer response, or 2) statement stimulus and statement response, or 3) statement stimulus and question response: Ex 1: R: Is your name Chan? /Lee/ S: No, it's Lee. Ex 2: R: He speaks Cantonese. /Mandarin/ S: He speaks Mandarin too. Ex 3: R: He speak Cantonese. /Mandarin/ S: Does he speak Mandarin too? 4. Transformation Drills In transformation drills the students transform the grammatical form of the cue sentences from positive to negative to question, according to the pattern set in the example. A positive to negative transformation would be: R: Her name is Lee. S: Her name isn't Lee. 5. Combining Drills In combining drills the students make one long sentence from two short cue sentences, according to the pattern set in the example. R: It's nine o'clock. We study Chinese. S: We study Chinese at nine o'clock. 6. Conversation Drills In conversation drills students carry on a conversation following the pattern set by the example. The book or the recording furnishes cues to vary the content while retaining the structure. A: Good morning, Mrs. Lee. B: Excuse me, I'm not Mrs. Lee. My name is Chan. A: Oh, excuse me, Miss Chan. B: That's all right. .... A: Good morning, Mrs. Smith. B: Excuse me, I'm not Mrs. Smith. My name is Brown. A: Oh, excuse me, Miss Brown. B: That's all right.
1. Substitution Drills The recording gives a pattern sentence, and then a word or phrase (called a cue) to be substituted in the original sentence. The student notes the substitution cue and substitutes it in the appropriate place to make a new sentence.
2. Expansion Drills There are two kinds of expansion drills. One could be called a listen-and-add drill, using vocabulary and structures familiar to the students. The recording gives a word or phrase and the students repeat it. Then the recording gives another word or phrase and the students add that word to the original utterance, expanding it. Then another cue is added, and the students incorporate it, and so on, making each time a progressively longer utterance.
This type of expansion drill is handled a little differently if it includes new vocabulary. In that case it is performed as a listen-and-repeat drill, the students echoing the recording:
In the second type of expansion drill the example sentence gives the model to follow and the students expand the subsequent cue sentences according to the pattern set by the example:
3. Response Drills The response drills involve 1) question stimulus and answer response, or 2) statement stimulus and statement response, or 3) statement stimulus and question response:
4. Transformation Drills In transformation drills the students transform the grammatical form of the cue sentences from positive to negative to question, according to the pattern set in the example. A positive to negative transformation would be:
5. Combining Drills In combining drills the students make one long sentence from two short cue sentences, according to the pattern set in the example.
6. Conversation Drills In conversation drills students carry on a conversation following the pattern set by the example. The book or the recording furnishes cues to vary the content while retaining the structure.
Conversations for Listening The Conversations for Listening audio recordings give students a chance to listen to further conversations using the vocabulary and sentence patterns of the lesson under study. Usually several replays are needed before the students' comprehension of the conversation is complete. After they understand a conversation in its entirety it is recommended that they play it through two or three more times, listening especially for the expressive elements of intonation and final particles, as these occur primarily in conversation and not as natural features of pattern j sentences which the students practice in the drill sections.
After Lesson 10, there will be new vocabulary in the Conversations for Listening, to help the story along. These words and phrases are glossed in Cantonese and English at the foot of each conversation in the printed text, but students will not be held responsible for learning them.
Vocabulary Checklist At the end of each lesson is a vocabulary checklist, giving the new vocabulary for that lesson, the part of speech for each entry (noun, verb, etc.), and the English translation.
System of Romanization Used The system of romanization used in the text is a modification of the Huang-Kok Yale romanization. It is described in detail in Lesson 1. In comparing Cantonese and Mandarin sentence structures the system of romanization used for the Mandarin is Yale romanization.
