How I Learned Cantonese From Scratch - Part 1 (Year 1)
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This article was last updated Nov 13th, 2024
Contents
Figuring Out How to Learn a Language
Binge-watching YouTube Videos
The Power of Flashcards
Building the Foundation
Learning the 6 tones - Not as Hard as You Might Think
iTalki Lessons - Learning to Speak (with a visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown)
Setting Achievable Goals
Getting Used to Native-level Speech
Starting to Learn the Characters
Glossika - Mass Sentences
1 Year Video Update
Cantonese Resource List (everything I used)
Cantonese is considered one of the most difficult languages in the world. And I remember when I was just beginning and trying to figure out how to actually do it.
So I wanted to make a comprehensive breakdown of how I went about learning it. So that those of you who want to learn Cantonese or are currently learning it can get an insight into how I did it and the methods that I used.
And to inspire you and give you ideas that you can use in your own language learning.
Even if you’re not learning Cantonese but another language, particular one of the “harder” languages out there, you will still benefit from this post and be able to apply it whatever language you’re currently learning or wanting to learn.
The methods and mechanics of language learning remains by and large the same no matter what language we’re learning.
My aim is to be as clear as possible with what it actually looked like for me to learn it with the daily activities, the resources and methods.
This one will be a longer post, so grab your coffee or beverage of choice and let’s get into it!
Figuring Out How to Learn a Language
I had just returned back home to Sweden from a life-changing trip (read my blog post: How My Love Story With Hong Kong & Cantonese Started to get the full background story on why I started learning Cantonese).
A fire was lit inside of me to learn the language. I just had to do it. And I was so excited to start.
Now being home and I set out to start right away (I even remember the exact date - Dec 10th 2017).
The only problem or rather issue was - I had never gone after intentionally trying to learn a language, let alone one that is considered one of the world’s most difficult languages.
Sure I had learned English and Norwegian, but the first were over the span of decades and the the latter is very close to Swedish so just by interacting with Norwegians along with a fair dose of curiosity I had been able to pick it up.
Cantonese, however, was something entirely different.
Honestly though, I never thought about the difficulty level or even how long it would take long to learn Cantonese. None of those things were a concern for me. It just didn’t matter.
So from the beginning I had zero pressure or stress about learning Cantonese. Just a very strong desire.
And to be honest, I really liked the idea that it would be a challenge. It just made it that more appealing to me.
Now I just had to figure out how to go about it.
Binge-watching YouTube Videos
I wanted to figure out the best methods for acquiring the language. To do it in the most effective way possible. Something that actually worked.
I knew Duolingo wasn’t gonna cut it since I had tried it before for about a year to learn Spanish with minimal success.
I kind of a blessing in disguise was that I was sick after my trip and unable to do much of anything other than lay on the couch for about 2 weeks. So I what I did was binge-watch youtube clips about how to learn a language.
It was pretty much all I did for those 2 weeks. And I learned a lot.
I have since literally watched hundreds of youtube videos, read blog posts, listened to interviews, experimented myself by trial and error - all to find the most optimal way to learn a language.
As I searched for “how to learn Cantonese” videos I came across a guy name Olly Richards. I saw a video of him speaking Cantonese after 1 year.
I was definitely impressed. To think that you could get to that level in that short amount of time was really inspiring to me.
So I thought to myself: “if he could do it, then I can too”. I even ended up making a 1 Year Cantonese update video of my own (you can watch the video at the bottom of this post).
The Power of Flashcards
In the beginning I tried out a bunch of different apps. Some were fun were you got to repeat words and then hear it back through an instant recording - which was actually useful just to get instant feedback on the pronunciation.
However I didn’t know what I was doing so I mostly fumbled around for the first weeks or so trying to figure out what to do.
I had heard about Flashcards and how it was a great way to learn so I downloaded an app called Anki. This ended up being an amazingly useful tool that I’ve used during my whole journey of Cantonese.
Anki is highly customizable so it requires a bit of knowledge of how to set it up. But it’s an awesome way to repeat vocabulary through an algorithm that is based on repeating the cards with the vocabulary you want to learn just before your brain is about to forget it. Something called “Spaced Repetition”.
Sometimes it’s eery how accurate it is.
I used Anki to add new vocabulary and sentences and have an easy way to be able to review those and practice them. It also kept the vocabulary I was learning organized into one place.
Building the Foundation
Early on I bought access to an online course called Cantonese Class 101 (← get 30% off, any plan). I got it just to get some kind of beginner’s material to start with (I personally got the premium plan as I felt that was enough for what I needed).
It’s a language course in podcast format that has lessons that go with it. The podcasts are mostly in English which doesn’t really help you to learn your target language, but they were enjoyable and gave me an introduction to Cantonese since I knew nothing about it.
And the podcasts I could just listen to on-the-go which was great.
Every lesson started off with a brief conversation between two people. This was the most useful part of the lessons in terms of actually acquiring the language (Olly Richard’s also wrote a very useful blog post about how to use this material effectively).
Cantonese 101 has a lot of different features and material, but I figured out the most efficient way for me to use it: the dialogues.
I’m not someone who believes in studying a language but rather get the language inside of you. And as a beginner, short dialogues is a great way to do so.
So I actually recorded the audio of each part of the conversation with my phone and then added it to Anki as Flashcards, along with the jyutping (phonetic notation) and English translation.
This is not something you have to do, and maybe I wouldn’t do it today. You could just go to the lesson and listen to the audio there. But at the time I just liked that whole repetition was automatized.
I found it so convenient to have it all in my Anki with me on my phone and that everything was organized in one place. Like my own database that I built with everything I was learning.
The sentences would pop up in my phone as I went through my flashcards every day. I would mimic and repeat after them. Saying the words and phrases out loud - this was absolutely key. This is how I really nailed down the pronunciation quickly.
And it’s also how I learned the tones of Cantonese - (there are 6 different tones that is assigned to each word. A different tone means a different meaning and word).
I would just take my time to say the sentences on the flashcards out loud - and in that way get exposed and used to pronouncing different tone combinations.
Most of these flashcards I did while time that would otherwise be wasted - in the bathroom, sitting on the bus etc.
Learning the 6 tones - Not as Hard as You Might Think
I didn’t find the sounds of Cantonese particularly hard. There are not that many new to learn. Only the “z” (like it zi1 知) or “zh” (like in 煮 zyu2) & the “oe” (like in 去 heoi3) and “chi” (like in 詞 ci4) are the ones I deliberately practiced.
It only took me a couple of months to get a good handle on the tones to the point where it felt natural. I was just focused on them, and the sounds, to make sure I got them correct.
Focusing on getting the pronunciation right in the early stages of learning a language will save you a lot of correcting bad habits in the future.
It was really helpful that most of my flashcards were whole sentences (rather than isolated words) as I got to practice not only hearing the language in context, but also how to speak the tones in all the different combinations with each other.
With time I was able to say the different combinations of tones more naturally.
People, especially native speakers, had said the amount of tones makes Cantonese “impossibly difficult to learn”. But I don’t think that’s true at all. It takes some time to get used to, but I honestly didn’t find them very hard.
Maybe that’s due to my background as a musician, but I also know people without any musical experience that have been able to learn them just fine.
I’ve mentioned this in other posts but I actually found it easier to memorize new phrases and sentences because of the tones. The sentences are like short musical phrases and melodies that just stuck to my mind much easier (just like a song would do)
iTalki Lessons - Learning to Speak
After about 1.5 months I also started taking lessons on iTalki (get $10 free extra credits after your first lesson).
I wanted to get into speaking the language as I had heard it was an amazing way to learn and especially since Cantonese is mostly a spoken language.
I was really nervous before my first lesson, but I was also really excited.
My level was really bad during during that first lesson. I hardly understood what the teacher said even though she spoke slowly. And I could only say a few phrases myself.
But I liked that teacher so much that I ended up sticking with her for a long time. I took 1 lesson every single week for my first year. And I started making progress quickly.
Especially with the methods I used for getting the most out of my iTalki lessons.
(read my post: How to Get the Most Out of Your Online Lessons to read more about how I did this).
These iTalki lessons provided to be an invaluable resource for me. I would video record them (I used ECAMM Call Recorder for Skype to do this - however, it’s no longer compatible with M1 Macs) and after the lessons was done I would go through them and added the new phrases to my Anki flashcards. So that I could repeat the vocabulary throughout the day.
I kept on taking lessons, going through my Cantonese Class 101 course and I steadily made progress.
At the 3-4 month mark I went to the US and visited Chinatown in San Francisco. It was a blast getting to try some of my Cantonese skills with the locals there.
Even though my conversational skills were quite rudimentary I was able to communicate and people were impressed. It felt amazing being in a restaurant and ordering food in Cantonese and also picking up some new phrases.
I definitely had my speaking sessions to thank for being able to do this.
Going out and trying to use the language with locals who speak your target language is one of the most motivating things you can do. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t very well yet.
No one in Chinatown expected this long-haired Swedish guy to speak Cantonese so whatever I said left people dumb-founded.
And when learning a less common language to learn like Cantonese it means that much more to people that you’re learning their mouther tongue.
It was definitely a big boost to continue improving and learning.
The iconic entrance to San Francisco’s Chinatown, the world’s largest Chinatown in North America.
Setting Achievable Goals
I didn’t always spend a ton of time every day on my Cantonese. I didn’t want to set overwhelming goals that I then wouldn’t be able to maintain.
I just set the goal from the beginning to spend at least 5 mins a day learning. I mean you always have 5 minutes. So if I did 5 minutes than I considered it a success.
When you have a goal that low you can always accomplish it - which makes you feel good about yourself. And once you start you’ll pretty much always do more.
So I started small and then just increased the time naturally as I did it more and more. It was usually around 15-20 mins per day in the beginning and then after several months around 1 hour or so per day. Sometimes more.
But it’s hard for me to know exactly how much time I spent because I was enjoying it so much so I wasn’t exactly counting the time.
Many people start with doing too much too soon, get burnt out and then quit. Learning a language is more like long-distance running and steady slow process. It’s better to do a little every day than a lot one day and then taking several days break. Your brain needs time to process it all.
Would you like to know my best secrets
to learn any language successfully?
Getting Used to Native-level Speech
By around the 6-7 month mark I started feeling I wasn’t progressing so much with the Cantonese 101 material anymore. It had served it’s purpose but I had reached a certain plateau and it was now time for something new.
So I jumped into Olly Richard’s Conversations Course (which I highly recommend if you want to burst through from the beginner stages to the intermediate level).
This is when the real challenge began. But also some real breakthroughs in me starting to understand rapid-fire, fast native speech. And Cantonese speakers do speak fast.
Whenever you move on from the beginner stuff into intermediate level stuff there is no shortcut or necessarily even a smooth way to do it.
You just gotta throw yourself into it.
Cantonese Conversations is a course that has videos and audio of Hong Kongers having 3-4 min natural real-life conversations with each other at full speed and the way they naturally speak without dumbing it down in any way (it’s available in 6 other languages as well. You can head over to my resource page for more info).
These then come with the jyutping (phonetic notation), the Chinese characters and the English translation. Which made it a highly useful resource.
What I did was - first just to listen to the audio to see what I could understand.
At first I couldn’t understand much. Like I said Cantonese is very fast so when hearing it at full speed so it was a quite overwhelming feeling for me.
The words were coming to me faster than my brain could register them. And even if I did - the speakers were already talking about the next thing before my brain had registered what they had said.
So I listened through it a bunch of times just to see what I could pick up just by hearing. Next I would read with the jyutping (phonetic) transcript which helped a lot. By doing that I realized I actually already knew some of the words. I just hadn’t been able to recognize them by hearing it.
I then copied the transcript over to a document and color-coded all the words I didn’t know in “red” so that I would especially see those words when reading through the transcript.
I also put the new words into Anki to practice them on-the-go and expand my vocabulary. It was very useful since they spoke very colloquial and the way people do in Hong Kong.
I then took portions of the audio and used the program Transcribe - which made it easy to loop certain sections (many programs do this, I just happened to have and like Transcribe from my good ole musician days).
I would then listen to maybe 30-40 seconds of the audio at a time. This made the audio much more digestible.
I would do this for maybe 45 mins to 1 hour every day. And within weeks I noticed huge improvements in my listening.
I kept working with the course for months and kept listening to the audio. I didn’t finish the course in a few months, but I came back to it later on and work on it until I understood every single one of the conversation completely.
It was definitely a nice achievement. The course is a great “gateway” to set yourself up to be able to start consuming native-content.
Starting to Learn the Characters
Initially I said I wasn’t gonna learn to read and write Chinese. Since I knew that was something that was gonna take time I had my focus on being able to speak well instead.
But it wasn’t long (maybe 3 months) before my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to start casually learning some characters.
Exactly how I learned the characters and how to read (and write) I’ll share in a future blog post (coming soon!).
But I used a combination of the book Remebering the Hanzi by James Heisig and the awesome app Skritter (click here to get an exclusive LINGTUIVE discount att 10% off) that helps you write the characters with the right stroke order and repeat them with a Spaced Repetition System.
(Or try first a demo - the 10% discount code will still be applied when you visit the signup page. It’s a bit clunky on a computer, but works great on a phone).
Glossika - Mass Sentences
Glossika was another highly useful tool that I used. I first learned about it from Xiaoma (famous youtuber who went by “Ari in Beijing” at the time) and I thought it could be useful to develop even more flow and fluency in my speaking.
Glossika is just mass sentences. You’re getting tons of sentences first said in your target language and in English (or whatever language you choose as your native language).
And there’s a gap so that you can repeat the sentence in your target language. So you’re basically just mimicking the native speaker and trying to sound like them.
This is an awesome way if you want to start being able to speak more fluidly - more fluently.
Because you’re getting mass exposure through useful sentences. So you’re improving your comprehension but most of all your ability to produce the language with ease.
You’re doing a lot of reps in a Spaced Repetition System format so the words just start rolling off your tongue with less and less effort.
And I also love that you can do it while you’re doing other things. So I would just do it when I was doing the dishes or while driving (it has text too so you might not wanna drive if you wanna read along at the same time).
It’s a highly researched approach and very effective.
It’s not for everyone as some find this a bit too mechanic of an approach, but I enjoyed it since it was easy to do. I definitely noticed a big difference in being able to speak with a lot more ease and a lot faster too.
I used Glossika for about 5 months or so. About 20 mins per day every single day.
Watching Youtube & Movies in Cantonese
I would watch youtube in Cantonese here and there and had a bunch of youtubers that I was following. And I’d sometimes go through youtube clips with my teacher so she could help me clear up the parts that I didn’t understand.
I’d also watch Cantonese movies here and there on occasion.
But it wasn’t until much later on that I would really start watching more youtube and immerse myself in the language (more on that in the part 2 of this post).
And if I have any regrets then that’s definitely the one thing I wish I would have started with sooner. Just because of how helpful it is for comprehension.
Watching movies and native content is of very little use as a beginner, but once you start reaching that intermediate level it’s incredibly beneficial for your development.
1 year video update
As promised here’s my 1 year update of learning Cantonese. Doing something like this was only possible through me getting speaking practice through my iTalki lessons.
It was the culmination of what had been an incredibly fun journey to figure out how to learn a language effectively, but most of all to discover the beauty of the Cantonese language and culture.
Enjoy!
Cantonese Resource List (everything I used)
If you’d like to see clearly what my 1st year of Cantonese looked like here’s a breakdown of exactly what I did and when:
Cantonese Class 101 (months 0-6)
Cantonese conversations (months 7-12)
iTalki (months 2 - 12)
Glossika (months 5-10)
Anki Flashcards - Months 0-12
Remembering the Traditional Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters (month 3-12)
Skritter (months 5-12)
Are you currently learning or are wanting to learn Cantonese? Tell me below in the comments! I’m also curious to hear - what is your particular reason for learning it?
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