- 200 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
Intermediate Cantonese is designed for learners who have achieved basic proficiency and wish to progress to more complex language.
Each of the 25 units combines clear, concise grammar explanations with communicatively oriented exercises to help build confidence and fluency.
Features include:
- Many authentic examples from contemporary media, including films, advertising, songs and soap operas
- Clear differentiation between colloquial and more formal speech registers
- Up-to-date analysis of contemporary Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong.
Suitable for independent learners and students on taught courses, Intermediate Cantonese, together with its sister volume, Basic Cantonese, forms a structured course of the essentials of Cantonese grammar.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, you can cancel anytime from the Subscription tab in your account settings on the Perlego website. Your subscription will stay active until the end of your current billing period. Learn how to cancel your subscription.
No, books cannot be downloaded as external files, such as PDFs, for use outside of Perlego. However, you can download books within the Perlego app for offline reading on mobile or tablet. Learn more here.
Perlego offers two plans: Essential and Complete
- Essential is ideal for learners and professionals who enjoy exploring a wide range of subjects. Access the Essential Library with 800,000+ trusted titles and best-sellers across business, personal growth, and the humanities. Includes unlimited reading time and Standard Read Aloud voice.
- Complete: Perfect for advanced learners and researchers needing full, unrestricted access. Unlock 1.4M+ books across hundreds of subjects, including academic and specialized titles. The Complete Plan also includes advanced features like Premium Read Aloud and Research Assistant.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes! You can use the Perlego app on both iOS or Android devices to read anytime, anywhere — even offline. Perfect for commutes or when you’re on the go.
Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Intermediate Cantonese by Virginia Yip,Stephen Matthews in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Languages. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Unit 1
Consonants and vowels
In this unit, we assume familiarity with the basic sounds of consonants and vowels as described in Basic Cantonese. Building on this base, we review some of the main difficulties and delve further into variation among these sounds. To represent sounds accurately, symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are given in square brackets: [∫], for example, represents the consonant in ‘shoe’.
Difficulties for English speakers
Certain Cantonese sounds pose particular difficulties for native speakers of English and, in some cases, other European languages. These include:
| • Front rounded vowels: | yu [y] as in syū 書 ‘book’ |
| eu [œ:] as in séung 想 ‘want’ | |
| [e] as in geuk 腳 ‘foot’ | |
| • Affricates: | j [ts] as in jā 揸 ‘drive’ |
| ch [tsh] as in chóh 坐 ‘sit’ |
Rounded vowels
Rounded vowels are produced with the lips ‘rounded’ or pursed. In English, only the back vowels о (as in ‘hope’) and u (as in ‘who’) are rounded. In Cantonese, the front vowels yu and eu are also rounded: yu is produced like i, and eu like e, with the addition of lip rounding. These vowels do not have precise equivalents in English, yú 魚 (fish) should not sound like English you nor should jeuk 著 (wear) sound like jerk: in each case, the lips must be rounded outwards to produce the right vowel sound (pouting may help here).
eu is especially difficult since its quality varies according to the following consonant sound:
| Longer, lower [œ:] | Shorter, higher [ɵ] |
| | |
| chéung 搶 rob | chéun 蠢 stupid |
| chēung 窗 window | chēut 出 go out |
| leuhng 量 capacity | leuht 率 r... |
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Consonants and vowels
- 2 Tone contours
- 3 Changed tones
- 4 Reduplication
- 5 Word formation
- 6 Verb-object compounds
- 7 Adjectives and stative verbs
- 8 Classifiers revisited
- 9 Topic and focus
- 10 Using jēung 將
- 11 Serial verbs
- 12 Aspect markers
- 13 Comparisons
- 14 Resultative and causative sentences with dou 到
- 15 Quantification
- 16 Negative sentences
- 17 Questions and answers
- 18 Relative clauses
- 19 Subordinate clauses
- 20 Conditional sentences
- 21 Reported speech
- 22 Cantonese speech conventions
- 23 Particles and interjections
- 24 Colloquial syntax
- 25 Code-mixing and loanwords
- Key to exercises
- Glossary of grammatical terms
- Index