Any news on cantonese pronunciations being added?

this would be pretty cool, I second the request

I still don't have a source for them, so no progress has been made.

Aren't they in Unihan (at least for characters)?

I don't know if this is usable to you but there is lots of stuff in Unihan. I am currently trying to learn Cangjie codes and have a little Anki deck with these.

I mean, sound files we could use. None of a Cantonese version would be an exact conversion or very clean, so I'm hesitate to start complicating things to get it in there, especially when most people interested in it are even more spoken-oriented.

i understand if these things take time. but i strongly request this feature. if anything, at first it could just be jyutpin. don't worry about the audio for beta stages. that should be easy to implement.

connect with cantoneseclass101.com for collaborations.

I've been curious for a while, how different is Cantonese from Mandarin?

Apparently they're mutually unintelligible, although they share (mostly) the same characters. I still don't understand how that's possible...

http://khuang.com/learnchineseblog/differences-mandarin-cantonese/
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081015011114AAiRP2n
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_language

The frustration I've encountered lately is that I'll start a Netflix movie that is supposedly in Mandarin (or sometimes just "Chinese") and it turns out to be in Cantonese. ARGH!

Cantonese has 9 (ack!) tones. I found this website during my preliminary investigations, which is pretty cool since the dictionary and some example sentences list both Mandarin pinyin and Cantonese pinyin together.

http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/

I've spent maybe an hour perusing and reading, so I don't know if the grammar's any different. That's where Japanese and Chinese are totally different, by the way. Even though Japanese and Chinese share many characters, Japanese grammar is extraordinarily difficult and very different from Chinese (based on my still infantile Mandarin capabilities I've picked up thus far).

Thanks for the links! The first one was especially helpful.

Well, with regard to food, there seem to be at least some similarities (enough that you can make out what's wanted). Eg, wonton／huntun, or dimsum/dianxin. I don't know how far this extends beyond that though !

A lot of the nouns in Cantonese are very similar to Mandarin. Once you internalize the verbs, I think it will be easy to speak. Pronunciation will take a bit of practice though.

Also the tones aren't that bad. There's technically 6 tones, which perfectly match a musical scale (unlike mandarin). If you're musically inclined, Cantonese tones and phrases can be remembered as a bunch of melodies. (at least for me)

@xingyang have you seen this paper?

http://marcs.uws.edu.au/links/ICoMusic/Full_Paper_PDF/Ho_Ho.pdf

"This agrees with our experience with westerners’ speech, which always sounded funnily too melodious. Foreign learners very often follow too rigidly a static framework prescribed in textbooks or conceived
of by themselves in terms of musical scales when learning tone languages in general and Cantonese in particular."

Ha.. good read. Thanks for sharing. It's easy to act with hubris when judging your own abilities. So it's always good to do a humility check.

On that note, I would still argue that thinking in those terms can help westerners "get there" with tonal languages. Afterwards, it would be up to the learner to refine their pronunciation by mimicking native speakers instead of a piano.

: )