Learning Cantonese? Our free Cantonese podcast today takes place in a hospital, where a doctor and patient are having an intimate discussion about treatment options. And so while we hope you won't have to visit a hospital while in Hong Kong, this lesson should be useful to you even if you're in perfect health. Since in addition to a lot of high frequency Cantonese vocabulary, we learn to talk about success and failure rates, and how to describe percentages in Cantonese. This is critical stuff, so get listening!
user17643
 said on
October 30, 2011
Just found this site. Having learned Mandarin through ChinesePod I'm thrilled to find a similar service for my Cantonese needs. I suspect I might register soon!

However, one of the things that made ChinesePod so great is that they teach Mandarin as it's actually spoken, not as some grammarian somewhere thinks it ought to be spoken. This made for great and useful language. So with this in mind, I'm sad to hear you go with the "ngo5" pronunciation rather than the actual "o5". And to go with "百分之", which I've never heard in Hong Kong. In my experience, everyone goes with "九十嘅percent". There is nothing wrong with using loan words if the natives themselves use them. And there is nothing wrong with sounding natural rather than sounding like a TV presenter, pronouncing the "ng" in 我 and the "n" in 你 (should be "lei5").

So: great podcast, but please consider teaching the actual language spoken in Hong Kong, some some theoretical construct from a grammarian's book.
suel
 said on
December 1, 2011
I have to disagree with user17643. 90% of Cantonese speakers live outside of Hong Kong, and most of them still do use the ng and n sounds. Same issue with many of the loanwords.

Also, I think overall PopupCanto strikes a better balance than PopupChinese. Make the advanced lessons informal but don't stuff too much slang into the elementary ones! The PopupChinese "elementary" lessons are just too fast paced, informal, and short: 5 seconds of fast talking with little context, followed by a long 10-minute autopsy of what what was said. Not very useful.
trevelyan
 said on
December 1, 2011
Thanks for the feedback suel. Just out of curiosity, did you have any particularly Elementary lesson in mind when you mentioned Popup Chinese? The difficulty level more compressed there than here (only four levels), but its always useful to look at things in light of this sort of feedback.
suel
 said on
December 1, 2011
If I understand correctly, elementary is the 2nd out of 4 levels for Mandarin, and the 3rd out of 5 for Cantonese. So you would expect elementary in Cantonese to be at least as advanced as in Mandarin, not less, right?

Particular lessons: most of them. Recently, running with scissors, mid-autumn depression, letter from the cat, etc. What makes these hard to deal with is not the vocabulary (which is very useful), but the careless pronunciation (careless as in informal and coughed up, not incorrect) and the missing context due to the often unconventional stories.

BTW, I cannot find any intermediate lessons in Cantonese. Any idea when those will come? I can almost understand most of the advanced lessons, but probably intermediate would be the right level for me.

trevelyan
 said on
December 2, 2011
@suel,

Just to address the intermediate question first - yes - there's nothing at that level on Popup Cantonese yet. We're aiming to start publishing podcasts at that level sometime in January.

On the Popup Chinese front... I appreciate the honest feedback. I suppose for us naturalism is a feature rather than a bug. That said, there are always slower and more emotionally neutral recordings accompanying the transcripts, so those materials are available for people who want them.

Best,

--david