Learning From Life (Cantonese Edition)
If you’ve been studying a language for awhile, you might experience the joy of breaking away from textbooks and venturing into the world of real-life materials. Of course native speakers don’t consider them learning materials; they are just parts of life. But for a learner, everything and anything can be your new textbook. It is both exhilarating and a little overwhelming. I’ve been studying Cantonese for over a decade (definitely tortoise mode), and I have learned a thing or two about selecting content to learn from. Most beginners need to use learner-specific materials. We need the slow voices, the simple vocabulary, the bilingual text (or in the case of Canto learners, romanization). When I started learning Canto, these materials were few and far between. The ones that did exist often were unhelpful. I would start a new learning program only to quit in frustration over ridiculous romanization or content that mixed together Spoken Written Chinese and Colloquial Cantonese (spoile...