Trying to Learn Cantonese!

 So...I only know how to speak English. That's not entirely true.  I took Spanish for 4 years and was pretty much fluent.  I can still read and understand Spanish when I hear it, but I've lost my productive skills (speaking and writing) due to a lack of practice.  I am pleasantly surprised that when I was in Spain for the first time, I could ask questions about the airport-specific train tickets at the station.  I wasn't able to conjugate for nosotros, but I was able to conjugate for yo.  I'd call that a win.

Sometime during high school, I regretted not keeping up with Chinese school as a child.  Oddly enough, after two decades, I can still read the characters I learned as a child, but despite hearing my family speak Chinese around me my whole life, I cannot understand nor speak Cantonese.  It has been a long-time goal of mine to learn Cantonese, and something I've committed to off and on again.  Unfortunately, I do not have a schedule that will allow me to properly study the language daily, which is typically the best way to learn a foreign language.  Regardless, there are a few things I would like to learn in general to prepare myself to learn the language.

For those who do not know, Cantonese is one of the main dialects of the Chinese language.  My family specifically speaks both Cantonese and Toisanese (a regional variant of Cantonese) based on where they grew up.  However, the official language of China is Mandarin Chinese, the dialect generally spoken in Northern China.  My family is from Guangdong (formerly Canton) in Southern China.  While Cantonese is still commonly spoken in Guangdong, when Mandarin was made the official language, it also became the dialect taught in school.  Outside of Guangdong, Cantonese is commonly spoken in Hong Kong and Macau.  Additionally, many areas with a large Chinese population overseas speak Cantonese (ex. San Francisco, Toronto, etc.)

Cantonese and Mandarin are very different in terms of pronunciation, but they are spoken dialects of the same written language, Chinese.  However, another distinction should be made here between traditional and simplified Chinese.  Simplified Chinese (SC) is, as it sounds, a simplified version of traditional Chinese characters and is the standard for teaching the language in China.  The switch to SC happened around the same time as the switch to Mandarin Chinese as the official language, so most communities that primarily speak Cantonese still use traditional Chinese characters.  This is why most signs in Chinatowns across the globe use traditional characters.

How this affects a Chinese-American who wants to learn Cantonese specifically is that it is harder to find resources for learning.  Unfortunately, many language learning apps only have Mandarin Chinese, not Cantonese Chinese.  Also, many dictionaries will have Mandarin pronunciation, though pronunciation, specifically Romanized pronunciation systems, is a whole other beast (that I will cover in a different post).

Basically, I have decided to learn Cantonese when I have the time, and know that it will be a rather difficult endeavor. I'd like to document my journey so others who want to do the same will have access to the resources I found.