I've been looking everywhere for a decite site that teaches Cantonese

http://cantonese.chinesepod.com/resources-for-learning-f2.html?sid=d538df84503817095427502966a41efc

Hang on and I'll get the other one.

Here is the discussion forum. If you search you can find a lot of stuff.

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

Hi Hkboy,

How do I get to the cantonese forum?

Jianpuzhai, I would also suggest the FSI course.  AuntySue used to call it a boot camp for Cantonese.  It takes some patience and perseverance to get through it but if you do all the units you will learn a lot.  I also did the Pimsleur course.  It’s a bit expensive for what you get but not bad.  You can download the course without the CDs for about $150.  You may want to check out the discussion group over at the sheik site that was listed above.  There is a bit of information about materials there.  Of course there is nothing anywhere near as good as chinesepod for Cantonese.  I guess there just aren’t too many people studying Cantonese.

Good luck with your studies!  Oh, also some materials at the chinesepod Cantonese forum.  It's dead now but the info. is still there.

I think Spanish teaching programs and resources are much more widespread and well-established in the U.S. than Chinese ones. So, there is less demand for something like SpanishPod, even though Spanish is a very popular language to learn in the U.S. Same for the other Romance languages.

On "hot languages," is Spanish not "hot?"  I mean, its the fourth most spoken language on the earth and only English rivals it for geographical breadth.  It certainly remains the most popular foreign language here in the U.S. 

Zhenlijiang,

For the record, I don't think you were being rude at all, just telling the truth.  Some people misinterpret the naked truth, in other words, the things they don't want to hear, as rudeness.

in 2000 (has it been 10 years already?) I tried learning Japanese, it was my first foreign language.  Because it was my first, in the year and a half that I was studying I hardly progressed at all.

I found the honorific part of the language very difficult and, at the time I didn't understand how much pronunciation is so key to being understood and accepted.

While in the early part of my Japanese study, I went into a sushi restaurant, mustered up all my courage and in what must have been terribly butchered Japanese, said hello and asked the sushi chef his name.

He responded by telling me who he was by launching into (what felt like) and unending stream of Japanese words.  When he finally finished I politely told him in what was most definitely, horribly accented Japanese,

私は日本語が少ししか話せます

I imagine most of it was pronounced correctly, only with a thick American accent, however I pronounced しか like shi-keh instead of shi-kah, so the chef (I believe he was Masa San), contemplated for a while, not able to understand what I said, although I swore I said it right!  That was the one phrase I made sure I practiced over and over again because I knew before getting a great grasp of the language, I would have to use it over and over again in conversation.

Masa San kept on contemplating and I just sat back down at the counter and buried my head in my Miso soup, completely embarrassed.

Five, maybe ten minutes later Masa San looked at me and shouted SHIKA!  SHIKA!!!

I couldn't understand how one word, one fairly unimportant word like しか could completely obscure the meaning.

I understand now, Japanese people have a certain level of expectation.

I personally agree that foreigners should completely adjust to the culture of the people they are trying to assimilate into, instead of expecting others to bend to them.  If Japanese demand this perfection from foreigners learning their language, then we should not make excuses and be obligated to comply.

I also cannot wrap my head around why people, when learning a foreign language do not want to learn to read and write it.  

After my Sushi restaurant incident, I started to buckle down and only use Hiragana and Katakana which I found to be great guides to pronunciation.  Kanji was something that, at the time was too difficult for me.  At one point I could write every Hiragana and Katakana, it's ashame I've completely forgotten it all!

我看过您的很多中文帖子，我觉得您的中文水平肯定很高！请问，您学习中文已经多久了？您的日语名字叫什么？您的中文名字叫什么？您现在住在中国吗？您为什么学习中文，是不是经济的原因？

Oh that's easy! "Decite" means to take back something that you've "cited".

e.g. The professor ended his lecture by apologizing for his earlier mistake. "The reference to the poisonous qualities of the custard tart that I attributed to Lyle and Hopkins was in error," he said. "I should now decite that."

Tal so we're not just oriental, we're metal too?

Oh I guess I should have asked the LZ but you would know, you're an English teacher. What is "decite"?  I've looked in dictionaries, online, but found nothing.

It's late though. Don't worry about answering.
明天见！

to the LZ: apologies for continuing to hijack. I promise this will be my last comment here.

The other Japanese poddies aren't agreeing with you because they're sooo Japanese, therefore sooo polite and indirect etc!

And the otherwises don't know diddley squat about Japanese anyway!

Anyway don't worry, I'm basically too much of a scaredy cat to ever try learning Japanese. I know underneath all that oriental inscrutability you guys are metal!

(And I hope you know I'm just having fun with you as I sit here at 4 minutes past midnight!)

(I know. Yahoo answers is a wonderful thing!)

Well Tal as you can see, that's just my opinion and no one, Japanese or otherwise, has agreed with me so far. So don't go burning any bridges yet!

(my goodness you're doing cynical in Japanese ...)

Interesting.

As for me, I'll probably never try learning Japanese now that I know what suffering my strangled articulation and dropped honorifics might bring to Japanese people. I mean I'm a teacher of English myself, and not minding the violence done to my own language by those trying to learn it (and I have to say those forced to learn it who don't actually care about learning it well) is a quality I have had to train myself carefully in.

Anyway for all those still hungering and thirsting for more hot Asian language learning via podcast, you might try JapanesePod101 (Get your free lifetime account in 7 seconds!) or even Learn Japanese Pod (Godzilla likes ipod!)

seizei ganbatte!!

Changye I don't think I need to relax any further than I already am.

I suppose what I actually mean is that the kind of people who find that Mandarin learning is so fun and works well on CPod would not find the same approach to work nearly as well for Japanese. I've already stated my reasons in the longer post that may have made you think I needed to relax.
I suppose my main concern is honorifics. Just imagine if you were a JPoddie, all the questions confused learners would have that you would be trying to help answer every day. Do you not agree that Mandarin is much simpler in that regard, and therefore more manageable to teach/learn over podcast? And the learning to read/write more characters--you really don't think that's a deterrent to some people?

Having said that, it is true I don't know really how easy podcast Mandarin learning is for beginners. I didn't begin Mandarin on podcasts, I came to CPod as an Intermediate learner.

Apologies for hijacking the thread.

As regards the Pimsleur Mandarin course, it was the first experience of learning Mandarin I had, before Chinesepod even existed I think. It's not for everyone perhaps, and is far from perfect, but I feel I gained a lot from it.

I still remember how I'd spend hours listening carefully to each lesson, to each segment which was to be repeated, and try to reproduce the sounds as faithfully as I could.

You certainly don't gain a vast vocabulary from it, but I believe it does teach good pronunciation to the patient learner, and lays a sound foundation for further study. Still worthwhile for a beginner in my opinion.

Chinese people just tend to laugh when they hear foreigners speaking Chinese badly (in my experience). This can be disconcerting, but I think it's seldom meant unkindly.

PS. Pinyin for Japanese, there's a novel idea waiting for some bright spark to figure out!

Hi zhenlijiang

Just relax. I don't understand well why you think learning Japanese with a podcast is so difficult. Actually learning correct pronunciations/intonations by use of a podcast is not so easy because noboday corrects your bad pronunciations, but I think the same is, more or less, also true for other languages.

I do not think it is a good thing that we Japanese can be quite intolerant when people are making the effort to learn our language. I am saying that unfortunately, it is there in reality, in varying degrees.

And heavily-accented Japanese does not make us angry, we just can't help not liking it.
Rudeness does make people angry, and "rudeness" is very often the unfortunate result of not knowing the honorifics well. This doesn't just happen with foreigners. It happens more and more among us Japanese.

I think we can generally say that Chinese people are much more tolerant of "butchering" by foreign learners than we are. That's encouraging and makes learners of Mandarin want to do even better, makes Mandarin an even more popular language.

Even rude people are entitled to their opinions, but you should read/listen more carefully if you're going to respond to someone.

Do I know you from somewhere?

Hi Zhenlijiang,

I don't agree with most of things you just wrote and guess what...I don't care if Japanese people dislike hearing heavy accents. I don't care at all and it only makes me happy if I make people angry. How do you like that? (Please don't reply, I don't really want to hear back from you. No offence)

While I'm always pleased to hear of interest in Japanese, I've said before I don't think it's a language easily taught via podcast. User experience will be much more frustrating for beginners of Japanese than Mandarin I think.

Something Mandarin has that Japanese doesn't that benefits foreign learners is pinyin. If you learn pinyin under good guidance you will be able to reproduce the "correct" sounds of Mandarin. Romanized Japanese will not help you reproduce the sounds we want to hear people utter when they're speaking Japanese--whether or not they're native speakers (yes we're rather demanding in this respect).
Despite the difficulty many Japanese have with pronunciation when we learn foreign languages, we can't seem to help cringing at, find it difficult to be generous and tolerant of, heavily-accented Japanese. Unfortunate because that helps discourage many learners, but true.

What Japanese has that Mandarin doesn't is the phonetic characters hiragana and katakana, along with all the kanji that need to be learned. But because romanized is not a valid way to get the sounds of Japanese accurately, even newbies would have to begin learning to read and write immediately. This also helps daunt some would-have-been learners I suppose.

Students of foreign languages "only wanting to learn to hear and speak, not read/write" is something I have discovered since coming to CPod. We don't have that concept where I come from. I don't know how a native-speaker teacher at a JPod would react to JPoddies asking why romanized text can't be provided along with Intermediate-level lesson material.

Another thing, the use of honorifics in Japanese can be a pain to learn, but you really do need to learn them well if you're going to speak or write anything. It's quite different from English or Mandarin in this way. I know many Chinese learners of Japanese who find them difficult (it's cultural, not just linguistic). I would go so far as to say that someone who can't be bothered to get the honorifics down correctly may as well drop the idea of learning Japanese right now, because that can not be neglected.
If you do neglect, you will most certainly end up being impolite and misunderstood nearly every time you open your mouth, incurring anger when you are only trying to be friendly.

... all of the above notwithstanding, if interest is real, why not let Praxis know how much money you are willing to pay for it? If there is enough demand and enough revenue to sustain such a Pod, they would give it serious consideration wouldn't they?

Hey guys,

I appreciate your input. I'm going to try out the FSI thing that vegabongpilgrim recomended. Thanks a lot for that, vegabondpilgrim.

As for the other languagepod sites that aren't doing well, I think it may be because they're far from in demand right now(especially Italion and Spanish). If I were to pick a handful of languages they would be(in no particular order) : Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Portuguese(because of Brazil and because it sounds dope).

I will second Simon's comment regarding Pimsleur. I dropped it after about 15 lessons because it wasn't doing me any good.

For what it's wortf, I completed the entire set of Pimsleur Mandarin. It didn't do squat for me. You learn far too few words for it to be useful. It also uses Spaced Repetition, but without input from the learner, making it much less effective than modern SR software.

As to CantoPod, I'd be all over it, but seeing how badly French- and ItalianPod is doing, I don't think we'll see any new pods in the near future, if at all.

Hi jianpuahai

I think you should've said this way,

Right now, east Asian languages are the most important for me; not: German/French/Spanish.

Jianpuzhai,

I totally agree with you, right now Asia is hotter than a drawer full of fire %u8682%u8681%uFF01CJK is the language mantra of the new century!

Speaking of which, I wonder if Praxis is open to adding Korean?

I personally would love to see Praxis put it's expertise to tackling Shanghainese, Sichuanese (Chongqing dialect), the Kunming dialect and Hokka. Maybe not fully indepth but perhaps a short intoductory series on each. Of course I know that's just wishful thinking.

You might also want to look at the FSI course.  It's not for everyone, but the price is right...

@xiaohu,

I appreciate all your insight. I'll consider that product you mentioned, but since I'm sort of a visual learner, it might not suit my needs. I would love a Japanese site too!! I took a look at the Praxis languages available and I think that Chinese may be the only one that was a good idea. The others aren't "hot" languages. They're just not. Right now, east Asian languages are the most important; not: German/French/Spanish. And as for English, I think that's a language in which there are much better resources available (such as all of the English speaking humans that live all over the world and usually only speak English)

RJ,

There once was a texas gent named Clay,

With visions of a Canto-riffic day,

"For learning Canto, who gives a hoot?"

He asked, as he gave himelf the boot,

想学习广东话的到底是谁?

;)

jianpuzhai,

Pimsleur is the best!  Your goal is to learn to speak Cantonese right?  Don't worry that it doesn't contain jyutping or teach you to read, because your options out there are really limited.  Given everything that I know of, Pimsleur is going to be your very best option.

Perhaps the only option.

Pimsleur costs about the same as a yearly subscription to Chinesepod, and it's way less money that a year of Cantonese at College.

Like I said, your options here are extremely limited seeing as Cantonese is a dying language.

The only other thing I can think of is to try www.livemocha.com.  It's a site to match language exchange partners.  Sure everything is free, but you'll be completely at the mercy of the free time and focus of your language partner.  I tried it about a year and a half ago and found that the people I met on it were very flakey.  They would be very excited about language exchange for the first few weeks and then, slowly life would get in the way of language exchange.  Either that or it was a terrible case of 三分钟的热度.

Personally I would love for Praxis to start a Japanese and Cantonese site, but seeing that Cantonese is on the out and out, and the American love afair with all things Japanese has cooled off, I don't see it happening anytime soon. 

Please reconsider Pimsleur, it will get you speaking Canto in no time flat.  Trust me, it's worth the money.  

I went online and checked out the Pimleur Cantonese series. The problem with that is it doesn't offer any sort of written supplement. People who purchase don't get to ever look at anything that goes with it (such as pinyin/English/Chinese characters) , and therefore it's not a good way to study- especially for visual learners. Besides that, it also costs over 300 dollars, which is really a lot to pay for a boxset of audio CDs. If they were interactive DVDs, like those of Rosetta Stone(which doesn't offer Cantonese), then that would be another story. Thanks for the suggestion, Xiaohu, but I have to pass on the Pimleur Cantonese series.  

jianpuzhai,

I don't think it's all that great either. But it's the most complete resource on the web to learn Cantonese.

Looks like you're going to have to get the Pimleur Cantonese series.

Hi Xiaohu,

I've been to that site before. In my opinion, it's awful and hardly worth visiting

Well there once was a guy named Clay, and plans for a weekly show called "Cantoneasy". It was a good idea then, and would be an even better idea now.

Go to www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk