Learn to Speak Cantonese I: A Beginner's Guide to Mastering Conversational Cantonese Paperback – March 29, 2018

I bought this book looking to learn how to speak Cantonese quickly without getting bogged down in copious grammatical explanations. I absolutely loved it!There are 10 chapters that cover all the basics you need to know to get started speaking Cantonese right away with your friends, relatives, or simply the waiter at your local Cantonese dim sum restaurant! You progress through each chapter with new words and new sentence structures that help you communicate on various topics, such as greeting and getting to know other people, ordering food, and much more!The book also gives you access to a SPECTACULAR set of audio recordings that are invaluable for teaching you how to pronounce the words and sentences properly. This is one of the most important parts of the book!!! No matter how many times you read and review the contents of the book, you MUST take advantage of the audio resources to master the spoken element, and the audio recordings with this book are perfect for doing just that!I highly recommend anyone looking to learn Cantonese buy this book!

I like the book, easy understanding! Nice buy!!

This is a good basic introduction to Cantonese as it is spoken in Hong Kong. I have confirmed this with several native speakers. The story is cute, and provides a backdrop to explain the order in which subjects are being learned.One vocabulary word that I have noticed is a bit off. She (the author) explains that 牛百葉 is “ginger scallion tripe" but the word is simply the word for (beef) tripe. This is causing me to check the vocabulary lists with a dictionary, which is unfortunate.The audio is very clear, and the author takes great care to pronounce each word clearly, making the tones obvious to someone who already speaks a tonal language.Overall, a good book. My only issue is that the audio has to be downloaded separately. I know of Kindle books that have the audio included in them. That would have been more helpful.

Meeting my bf's parents this summer in Cambodia. He's a native speaker and even says the book is well-organized. The podcasts that go with the book are really echoey, which sucks because the language is so tonal and you need to listen clearly to each word. Other than that I love the book so far and the phonetic spellings are really helpful!Physical quality of book is nice too, not cheaply made.

Great book for beginners! I learned a lot of conversational Cantonese! I learned Mandarin first, but now I'm learning Cantonese too!

I thought at first that this Cantonese book wouldn’t get me anywhere. I grew up speaking mandarin and would always hear people speaking in Cantonese, but I just never understood even though I was intrigued. However this book got me through the basics of Cantonese, the audio files that came with it was super helpful! I’m able to sort of understand what my friends say when they speak Cantonese to one another. I’m looking forward to part 2 if there will be one.

Chinese characters are very small and difficult to see. I have attached a picture to illustrate my frustration. As you can see from the ruler, the characters are only 1/8” tall and they aren’t as dark as the regular characters. They are kind of faded out. I cannot use the book without additional magnification and a strong reading light.As many of you know, some Chinese characters can be very complex. Imagine trying to make out one of the more complex characters in only 1/8” size. Take out a ruler if you don’t know how large 1/8” of an inch is. It is incredibly tiny.Outside of this, the lesson has been pretty good. I’m on page 39 and I’ve learned a few words which is good.

Great work, easy story and you can listen on a streaming service and get it all!

This is the best book I've found so far for a beginner looking to learn cantonese. I found other books have an overwhelming amount of information for a beginner, while this has all the basics in concise chapters. I bought this a refresher, as I speak some cantonese but had forgotten a lot of it. It was great to refresh some basic words and grammar. My partner who does not speak any cantonese has been using this book as well and has learned a few words from it fairly quickly, compared to the other books.

It was my introduction to Cantonese and to Chinese languages. This is one of my preferable book. Success and I need more books about Cantonese.

This is a great book, it’s not a particularly long book, but it’s quality content! Can’t wait for the next book in the series to come out!

I can only recommend using this book to get into learning Cantonese! I prefer Jyutping to Yale and love how you learn new vocab and grammar through every day situations! Enjoy the process and don't give up on learning this beautiful language :)

I love this! I ordered it for my partner who is trying to learn Cantonese and the content is fantastic and keeps him hooked :) The author has clearly put a lot of thought into creating useful, interesting and everyday material. However the landscape orientation makes it inconvenient to flip through, and the cover page paper quality could be better.