How are you using LingQ to learn Cantonese?

I was curious about how many Cantonese learners LingQ there are out there!

I’ve used LingQ daily for Cantonese for years and have read more than a dozen Traditional Chinese books and approaching 19,000 known words and 2 million words read. While I find that the vocab doesn’t transfer to listening as much as in other languages that I’ve learned (Spanish and Finnish) I have still found LingQ super valuable for my Cantonese!

I’d love to hear how you’re using LingQ for Cantonese specifically! What kind of content do you like to read? :smiley:

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Hi there, currently at 45,000 words for Cantonese because of a foundation from mandarin chinese.

Content wise, only looking for content that involves two people speaking to get the conversation listening portion fulfilled and diversifying vocabulary through news and youtube imports. Words is a huge factor for cantonese and any asian languages. Personal experience.

Happy hunting.

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45.000 words in Cantonese is impressive! Especially since word count in Chinese languages are lower due to no conjugations. Do you mark words as known when you know the pronunciation + meaning? Or when you know the meaning only but not necessarily the pronunciation?

What is some of your favorite Cantonese content that you have discovered?

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I mark a word has known when I know the jyut pin and the meaning. I ignore tones when trying to increase my known words. Tones personally are focused when trying to speak and selecting a selected amount of words to learn the tones of.

I listen to 会八十,健康旦 HiEggo, and anything that has two or more people

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That’s interesting. I only mark words known if I’m confident of the meaning + Jyutping and the tones. So it’s interesting to hear someone doing it differently. I find that I like being able to read with the correct pronunciation when reading outside LingQ, and in that way also reinforce the tones/pronunciation. What’s the reason you wait to learn the tones until later?

Nice man. Thanks for the recommendations.

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Sacrificing tones in the beginning will increase the rate of learning words which will let you have access to more words to subtitles in videos you can watch in order to be able to read/listen but reduces the rate to allow you to speak sooner. With subtitles, you’re relying on the sound to link with the characters that you are reading. The brain will associate the tones automatically in a listening practice setting but speaking is a manual thing we have to do on our own. Since listening comprehension is the biggest priority in most cases, this sounds like the most logical way but the need to speak will try to convince us to speak. Unfortunately, in order to speak, we need the tones. If there’s words that you lack in a sentence, the rate to understand the sentence and convert to acquisition for the brain is decreased. It’s a philosophical approach of which is more needed, speaking or listening comprehension.

In short, it helps increase the rate of listening comprehension. Since words are a combination of characters and there’s not that many to memorize (4000+), I learn tones in a seperate session. Maybe at night time I would go through passages and focus on remembering the tone number for each character. Math wise, probably learning about 10-15 words per night with the tones associated to them. It’s a snowballing language afterall. This language requires a vocab focused based approach to have access to any content.

Just my thoughts and personal approach

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Where do you find literature in Cantonese? So far I am mainly limited to Wikipedia. Do you have any other suggestions?

I unfortunately do not read literature in Cantonese. Only solely podcast. I’m sure it should be searchable

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That’s an interesting approach indeed. Thanks for sharing your philosophy!

There are some magazines and even certain books that are written in Cantonese. What type of literature/reading are you looking for?

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Mainly literature, preferably rather long books so that I can gain massive levels of quantity.