How I learned Cantonese From Scratch - Part 2
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Contents
Continuing to Take iTalki lessons
Focusing on Chinese Characters
Speaking to Tourists in Northern Finland
Frustrated With My Comphrension
Watching TV Shows & Movies
Reading
Anki Flashcards
Listening to Podcasts
My Cantonese Future
3-Year Update Video
This post is the continuation of my blog post: How I Learned Cantonese From Scratch - Part 1 (Year 1) so if you want to know what I did for my 1st year of Cantonese then check out that one.
And if you’d like to know why I decided to learn Cantonese then you can read about that in my post: How My Love Story With Hong Kong & Cantonese Started.
In this post I will be sharing what I’ve been doing after that 1st year up until today (currently 3.5 years into learning).
It’s been a very interesting journey especially since right at my 1 year mark of Cantonese I also added Finnish into the mix. Which in a way slowed down the rate of my progress but also made things very interesting learning both languages at the same time.
This part will be about increasing comprehension and really getting beyond those lower intermediate stages. Because that’s really what my Cantonese learning has been about since that initial year. As well as reading and learning the characters, which has been absolutely instrumental in my development.
You’ll also get to read about some of my encounters with Hong Kong tourists in Finland and other helpful tips that could helpful for you on your journey of learning one of the most beautiful languages there is.
At the end of this post you’ll find my 3-year update video that I made upon request by others.
Alright let’s get into the details.
Continuing to Take iTalki Lessons
For the first 6 months of my 2nd year of learning Cantonese I still took iTalki lessons about once a week.
After that I had some breaks for months and it ended up being a lot more sporadic because I was taking more iTalki lessons in Finnish.
I was also getting married (my wife is Finnish) so that definitely played a part in me focusing a bit more on Finnish for a while. And especially since I was preparing a wedding speech in Finnish as well (you can read more about that process here: How I Learned Finnish (Without Studying Grammar) - Part 2)
I took however a few lesson towards the end of the year before we got married. Because we actually went to Hong Kong on our Honeymoon!!
It was seriously the dreamiest trip ever. It was at the end of November in 2019 so it was right in the middle of a lot of the Hong Kong protests that was going on.
I seriously need to make a separate post about just that because knowing Cantonese made our honeymoon that much more amazing and special for so many reasons!
Look forward to that post in the future!
Focusing on Chinese Characters
For my 2nd year I still used Olly’s Conversations course until I felt I could understand all of the dialogues. I could have finished it quicker than I did but I was doing a bunch of different stuff so there were many gaps where I didn’t do it.
There’s a time for pushing through and finishing something all the way to the end. But there’s also the time to mix things up and do different things to keep things interesting.
But since I was using reading through LingQ (use this link to get up to 37% off LingQ. It’s free to sign up and try it out first.) as my primary method for learning Finnish I felt an urge to really improve my literacy in Cantonese as well.
I went through the first Heizig book: Remembering Traditional Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters to learn the first 1,500 character. Then I went on to the second book to learn the next 1,500.
I was working night shifts in Norway when I was doing this the most and going after it quite intensely. There was a lot of dead time during those shifts so I just took the opportunity to improve my language abilities.
I have very vivid memories of learning the characters and coming up with mnemonics there in the middle of the night at my work.
Ah the memories.
Exactly how I went about learning the characters I share in detail in the post: The Smartest Way to Learn to Read & Write Chinese
Reading is really the backbone of my language learning. It’s where I mostly learn new words get my quality input.
I’ve been using LingQ with my Cantonese since a bit before my 2nd year mark of learning. And especially from the beginning of 2020 and onwards I’ve been reading a lot.
Every day about 30-60 mins.
Learning Chinese characters is quite an undertaking and takes quite a bit of time. But it’s also very rewarding. I love how beautiful they are and it’s a special feeling being able to read Chinese.
I mean, it’s friggin Chinese! Who would have thought I would ever be able to read that? Certainly not me.
Speaking to Tourists in Northern Finland
I got married at the end of 2019 and when me and my wife came back from our honeymoon we lived in Rovaniemi, Finland for the first season of our marriage.
Rovaniemi is way up in the northern part of Finland (located on the arctic circle) and it just happens to be quite the hub for tourists. Especially from China and Hong Kong!
Before everything went down in the beginning of 2020 and travels came to a halt I would just bump into tourists from Hong Kong all the time.
I could hardly ever go to the grocery store in Rovaniemi without hearing Cantonese. And I would seize the opportunities to strike up a conversation.
If I wasn’t sure which Asian country people I saw were from then I would just pretend to look at something (I’m not joking lol) right next to them to see if I could pick up on what language they were speaking.
And of course as soon as I would say: “where are you from?” in Cantonese (你係邊度人 lei5 hai6 bin1 dou6 jan4?) then people would always be intrigued and quite shocked that this long-haired Swedish guy could speak their language.
I met a lot of interesting people and had all sorts of interesting conversations about what’s going on in Hong Kong, about their travels, taking selfies for them & I even had a wonderful older gentleman (who spoke no English) sing an ancient poem from then Tang Dynasty into my iPhone.
I still have that recording.
So many great memories and fun encounters with people. These moments are part of what makes learning a foreign language so special and meaningful as well as a lot of fun!
However, these conversations was part of what made me realize a serious flaw I had in my Cantonese. Something that I really wanted to improve if I were to take my Cantonese to the next level.
Me and a group of Hong Kong tourists that I ended up bumping into
at the local Supermarket in Finland
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Frustrated With my Comprehension
After around 2.5 years I realized my listening comprehension wasn’t what I wanted it to be. Sure, I could have conversations in Cantonese and my speaking was quite decent, but I found my understanding was very lackluster compared to my speaking ability. Given the impression that I was more fluent than I actually was.
The Cantonese Conversations Course (which I highly recommend - it’s available in 6 other languages too) had been really helpful in helping me understand native level speech. To get over that hump to be ready for more native-level content.
The only problem was that I had never made that shift to where I was actually consuming native level content.
I guess you could say it was the first time in my Cantonese learning that I really experienced some type of frustration.
Up until that point it had been smooth sailing and I hadn’t really had any difficult days or felt down about my level.
But when I was watching vlogs and things like that I was really struggling to understand.
I also felt that when we got deeper into certain topics with people that I talked to that I was pretty lost.
What really kept me from consuming a lot of content was that I hade this need to understand everything I listened to. And I’ve talked to other highly experienced language learners who have said they struggled with this in the past too.
It was after watching a video with Matt from Matt vs Japan where he talked about ”Tolerance for ambiguity” when I realized that I needed to up my game if I were to make progress in this area.
I wasn’t gonna get anywhere unless I just threw myself into it without worrying if I would understand or not.
Just trusting that my ears and brain would start to make more and more sense of it even if it felt like it was a waste of time doing it.
I was brought back to when I was a teenager in High School. We had a test in school in English and my weakest part was my listening comprehension.
And then, by no act of trying to deliberately improve it, I just watched TONS of movies and TV shows in English for the next year without subtitles. And the next time I took that test a year later - my listening was now my strong point.
So I started watching Cantonese YouTube videos. I quite honestly had to force myself in the beginning. But I started small and soon it started becoming more and more normal to watch these videos regularly.
If you want to get to that next level you just gotta throw yourself into it and just welcome the uncomfortability.
Some of those youtube videos I picked to go into a bit deeper and I would work on them with my iTalki teacher during my lessons.
What I did was just write down everything that I could make out and hear. And then when I wasn’t able to I would just write down the time and then go through the video with my teacher asking for example: “what does he or she say at 1:22?” And she would clear it up for me (I talk about this in my 3-year update video at the bottom of this post).
I would also write down all the words that I could make out but just had to look up in a dictionary. So I made my own transcript of the key and new vocabulary from that particular video.
I did this quite a bit for probably 5-6 months and definitely improved my comprehension.
Watching TV Shows & Movies
About 6 months ago I started watching the Cantonese dubbed version of a Japanese anime called Hunter x Hunter.
I was actually positively surprised at how much I understood when I started. There was still was a lot I didn’t understand but it was enough for me to be able to follow along even though many details were lost.
I kept going even when I didn’t understand and slowly it started getting better and better.
After now having watched over 140 episodes I’ve gotten quite comfortable. It’s a slow build but when you get that amount of exposure it really pays off.
It’s quite good to choose a TV show that has a lot of episodes. Since you just get so much input from it and a lot of the key words tend to stick since they are often repeated within the same world the show is in.
I also looked up new words and put it in my Anki Flashcard deck. You probably don’t wanna look up too many words as it will disrupt the flow and enjoyment of watching. But I would say I did about 3-5 new words per episodes, sometimes more depending on how I felt.
Having learned the characters helps a lot when looking up words because many show has the Standard Written Chinese as subtitles.
TIP: If you feel like you didn’t understand much after watching an episode of a particular show and are a bit confused - just go to a website that has a summary or synopsis and just read that to clear up those parts that you missed. This helps you get understand the story so you can continue watching and follow the plot.
Reading
Around the 2 year mark, right after I got back from our honeymoon I started reading more books in Chinese.
I had read enough of shorter things (for example the Hanzi transcripts from the Cantonese Conversations Course) and knew enough characters that I felt ready to start.
I started with The Little Prince and then moved on “Strengthen Yourself in the Lord” by Bill Johnson. The latter was in Standard Mandarin which was tough.
But I had a routine to do it while eating breakfast every single day for at least 30 minutes. I took months to finish that book but since then I’ve just continued to read and it has gotten better and better.
Especially reading in Cantonese, compared to standard mandarin, I find quite comfortable but I still have ways to go to really read fluently.
Anki Flashcards
As I mentioned I had some slower seasons with my Cantonese where I was more focused on my Finnish.
However, I kept up my flashcards no matter what so I always did something in Cantonese every day. There hasn’t been a single day where I haven’t done at least something.
I think this was very key not only to not lose my progress, but also to make sure that even if I was progressing very slowly. I was still progressing.
I didn’t add many new flashcards outside of the new vocabulary that I picked up during my iTalki lessons. I just kept repeating what I already had in my Anki deck.
Listening to Podcasts
Listening to podcasts is something I’ve been doing more and more over the past 8-9 months or so.
It’s both a very enjoyable and great way to get input, as well as a good way to learn new things about different topics.
I often listen to episodes while driving or walking somewhere to make the most out of the time that otherwise might be wasted. Just setting up small routines like that - “when I walk to work I will listen to a podcast episode” - really pays dividends in the long run.
And it’s a very easy language learning activity to do.
My favourites podcasts are currently Rhapsody in Lingo (if you become a Patreon member you get a full transcript of every episode) and 五分鐘心理學 (5 minute psychology).
My Cantonese Future
Even though I for sure have other languages I’m interested in learning - I’m not about to stop learning Cantonese. I feel I still have more depths to discover and I really want to be able to use the language naturally and comfortably.
Because for me, it’s so much more than just learning the language. It’s about connecting with this culture that I love and that really fascinates me and to get to know its people.
And I would like to be able to watch a movie in Cantonese and understand everything effortlessly. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m getting there.
Another thing I would like to be able to do is use more of those ending sounds that convey meaning and emotion in a natural way. Sounds like: 囉 (lo1*3), 㗎咋 (gaa3 zaa3) etc.
Those ending sounds is a big part of what makes Cantonese sound… well, Cantonese. It’s part of what makes the languages so expressive.
I already use some of them in my speech but I’m not always so aware of their meaning so I’d like to improve on that.
As well as just overall speaking with more fluidity.
I absolutely love speaking Cantonese. I feel I can be very expressive with myself and I just feel it fits my personality since it’s a quite high energy and fast-paced language.
Every language has it’s own personality and I just love the person I become when speaking it and the way it feels to speak Cantonese.
I’m excited to learn more but I’m at the same time in no rush. I know this is a language and culture that will be with me for the rest of my life.
———
If you’re interested in learning Cantonese I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It will enrich your life in so many ways and it’s definitely worth the time it takes to learn it.
It is a language that takes dedication, but I think the innate challenge of Cantonese is part of its appeal and what make it so special.
3-Year Update Video
Here’s my 3-year update video of Cantonese. In it I talk about my frustrations with my comprehension and about some of the methods I used to improve that.
Enjoy! :)
Are you learning Cantonese? If so, what has been your biggest challenge? Let me know in the comments!
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