Hey all, I posted this a few years ago (2023) when I initially released it. Now that the Windows 10 EOL is almost here (Next month 10/14/25), I've decided to re-post to raise visibility again. My strategy has been working flawlessly for all of these years and I don't foresee any issues moving forward. I hope this helps some people out there. Stay safe!
Not necessarily, the way I see it you can just jump in and start learning and practicing. Now is there a correct way to write the strokes, technically yes there is (which fun fact, Chinese writing is designed for right handed people. My wife is a native speaker from Hong Kong but she's a lefty, so she adjusted all stroke writing from the left handed perspective ;D), however, I would say writing the strokes properly when the goal is to learn how to read/speak/hear Cantonese is the main goal is alright. Will you have to unlearn bad habits or re-train yourself to write the strokes properly? Yes, this may be a possibility. Of course you could just research how to write the strokes from the beginning.
The Cantonese Scrolls is a project to document and teach the language, and record the characters for its direct written form. It doesn't contain every single aspect or tool for language learning, but the core material to preserve the language, let's say 250 years later when someone unearths it. This is also why I called it a scroll, since I view it as a sort of digital ancient document written on parchment paper haha.
- Country that speaks it (only Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, and the Overseas Diaspora speak it).
- Learners of the language are primarily within the above territories and learn it through exposure, not through actual proper education in Cantonese itself. But rather learn Standard Chinese writing in school, and just "auto-translate" to Cantonese in their mind. I would even say most Cantonese people don't know how to write Cantonese given the "defaulting to Standard Chinese". A lot of the times when I ask a Cantonese speaker how to write something in Cantonese, they don't know. This is due to many reasons which I won't elaborate atm in order to not make this post longer than what it already is. While this is good in "getting away with being able to write Chinese and communicate with the broader Chinese speaking world", it is not good for Cantonese itself. This is why we have so many words in Cantonese that don't even have a character. It also explains why eventually people did want to create more and more characters and luckily we were at least able to get the Hong Kong Supplementary Set standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Supplementary_Charac...
There has never been a point in Chinese history where the Chinese government has had this much power, and we already have plenty of evidence that they suppress and would like to eliminate the language from existence, and create their own view of what a "Chinese Person" and "Chinese Identity" is. Furthermore, we've already lost and mostly lost a lot of other Chinese languages. Hakka being one of them. It would be extremely difficult to find a Hakka speaker and Hakka learning resources at this point in time.
My time line for when Cantonese will die is far into the future, outside of my life time. But I would put it within the next 300-500 years or lower. Given this context, it is better to start the preservation and education efforts as early as possible.
I'm not expecting you to agree with me, but I wanted to give you some context. I'm not alone in my views.
Good question. I have actually and was recently playing around with that. The problem isn't necessarily the recordings (since I've accepted that I'm willing to record all the possible Cantonese sounds for all the words myself - I'm not a fan of AI and I don't use it in my personal life if I can avoid it), but more because of the nature of the project. I haven't figured out a way to be able to get the base directory of the site so that I can load all of the audio files from a specific directory, specially when being used in offline mode. If I was only running this project from a webserver, it's easy to get the website root and just append the audio location, but if you download the project for offline use, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to access the base dir from the file:// protocol perspective. I have some ideas but I'll need to experiment with that over time. As a stop gap measure I've added the "Core Audio Reference" page which is my recordings of all of the tones, initials, and finals. But it's still not the best experience.
Once I figure out the base dir thing I'll be able to easily just make every automatic romanization that you see an a href which points to the mp3.
Hey @dbtc, I did think about doing this but originally decided to try and find another solution. Reason being that atm my current directory structure is nested (with a variable length of nesting), and I also wanted to be able to use the audio files from anywhere in the app, which means outside of the dungeons directory. But you bringing it up again makes me think if I'm realistically going to be using them outside of the dungeons either way. Also, even if the main folder containing the audio files is called something else, as long as I have a flatter directory structure, I can make it work. I'll consider a flatter more predicable approach since having the audio files for each word is much more beneficial than not.
I'm aware of this and I've made a conscious decision to use the lazy pronunciation. I'm actually thinking of switching to lazy pronunciation as the standard pronunciation for a lot of words, the same as what some authors have done. It's more difficult and weird to teach people a pronunciation that not many people are using. At this point the lazy pronunciation has pretty much dominated the normal language development.
I agree 100% to use the lazy pronunciation. I'm a native speaker, and I don't think I've ever heard the formal except when talking to others who are trying to learn Cantonese.
I cannot corroborate the experience of the other commenter. 念 is very definitively nim6, with lim6 as a common variant/lazy pronunciation. It is not at all uncommon that words have a variant pronunciation when used in certain contexts (e.g. as jargon or slang), such as Wing Chun in your case, but the word itself is certainly not properly or even commonly pronounced the "lazy" way otherwise (c.f. 執念 zap1nim6; 萬念俱灰 maan6nim6keoi1fui1; 惡念 ok3nim6).
There are many cases where variant pronunciations sound natural, but (individually) "correct" pronunciations sound unnatural (e.g. 土瓜灣 tou2gwaa1waan1 "correct" but unnatural, tou2gwaa1waan4 "variant" and natural). I have never encountered a case where a correct pronunciation would be unnatural where "lazy" pronunciations would be natural.
On another note, your Cantonese sounds a bit unnatural (without many of the connecting words between thoughts) (typical for learners). A more natural phrasing might be something like this:
我打詠春嘅。學院(?)入面我師父同我哋都係讀lim嘅。反而如果有人讀nim會好奇怪。我想你明白粵卷唔使百分百啱晒嘅。講嘢可能淨係使啱八成到九成，大部份人都明你講嘅嘢。咁都OK嘅。學廣東話嘅學生可以多啲地方繼續學廣東話就可以越來越好。
A few notes on your usage:
"我都打詠春" 都 here seems unnecessary, as you have not discussed 詠春 previously.
"學院" slightly dubious, usually used for more academic purposes. For martial arts, 館 or 武館 may be more typical, but I suppose it is possible that your school brands itself as 學院.
"我師傅" "師傅" and "師父" sound the same, but mean quite different things. 師傅 is a polite name for someone working in some field, but 師父 is your master. (In fact this is another example of "lazy" or variant pronunciations, which is emphatically not always the correct pronunciation; 父 here is fu2, but by itself is definitively fu6)
"都話"lim"" "話" probably refers more to the topic of what someone says rather than the pronunciation, which the word "讀" would make clear, that we discuss pronunciation
"我推介你試吓明粵卷唔使係一百%啱" too be honest I'm not completely sure what this sentence means. I hope what I put was what you intended.
"一百%" 百分百 is more natural
"八十到九十%" 八成到九成 (lit. 8 10%s to 9 10%s) is more natural
"明你講乜嘢" (sounds like: understand what on earth you're saying) "乜嘢" emphasises the object like a question (i.e. sounds like a rhetorical question; when not a question, usually would be used when expressing frustration/complaining/scolding); no need to emphasise, "明你講嘅嘢" would be fine.
"學生可以繼續學廣東話。越來越好。" disjointed sentences, not completely sure your intended meaning. I hope what I put was what you intended.
Yes, I have mainly put awkward usages in the latter section, which will hopefully be useful to the author. If you compare the paragraphs, the outright grammatical problems I simply fixed. The author’s language is definitely comprehensible to a patient listener, but it can be much better still.
Thank you for the corrections, I definitely agree that while I've learned a lot of Cantonese in the past 11 years, I still have a long way to go and loving the process. Given that Cantonese is my third language (I've studied a bunch of other languages, but Cantonese is third language I'm actually specializing in for personal reasons), it makes sense that it sounds unnatural, at least for now. For a portion of it I do agree with the other commenter that it is a stylistic choice. The % part is just me using what's already popular in Cantonese speaking which is to use the "pou-cent" type of style rather than the more traditional way. You are right regarding 學院, my school advertises itself in this way hence my usage of it ;D. But overall, you got what I was trying to say which is the most important part of the process, I'll continue to improve over time :).
Thank you :). Definitely feel free to use, download and share 粵卷 for your learning. I'll be continuing to make improvements to it over time. This is a life long project of mine so expect more improvements as my Cantonese develops.
