Cantonese Dictionary

[Jerry B]

Is the below book on anyone's radar?

"A Glossary of Cantonese Colloquial Expressions"
by Simon Siu-Hing So

I'm not sure if this is being referenced in the above posts, but, if it's not, it's apparently available for ordering via Amazon.com as of August. It's publishied by the Chinese University Press and is 412 pages. Sounds interesting to me and may be pertains to the above discussion. Or not.

Jerry

[Great Wall]

Folks,

Some people mentioned Betty Hung's and Cream Lee's books on Cantonese. They can be ordered from the publisher's HP:

http://www.silkroadpress.com

[Polly Shum]

Dear all

It's really nice that so many people interested in Cantonese and I found the messages post are really helpful.

By the way, I would like to ask if anyone can suggest me a comprehensive chart of Cantonese pronounciations (ie. romanization symbol of each existing sound) which match with Chinese characters. I think it will be very helpful for beginner.

Thank you!!!



Cheers,
Polly

[rathpy]

Polly Shum wrote:
By the way, I would like to ask if anyone can suggest me a comprehensive chart of Cantonese pronounciations (ie. romanization symbol of each existing sound) which match with Chinese characters. I think it will be very helpful for beginner.

see...
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/C ... syllabary/

Regards,
rathpy

[nidhai]

Some of the dictionaries are all in Chinese and are some of my best and favorites (without English definitions). For example all of my Minnan dictionaries and glossaries are this way (all the English translated ones are over 100 yrs old, out of date, and not easy to use--and I don't even both with them). In China, it's rare to find two-way dictionaries.

[thamoskuk9]

Chinese characters are far more intricate than western letters of the alphabet; (It is worth noting however that each character contains meaning, whereas a western character is simply part of a word) and the complexity of the characters can be daunting at first. Take heart that it is definitely not as difficult as it first appears - after just a few lessons everyone in our class was writing the simpler characters with ease!

The first thing to learn is the correct stroke order, a common mistake is to try and draw the characters. This is a serious error for several reasons:

You are supposed to be writing not drawing. How quickly do you think you'd be able to write in English if you drew each letter, sometimes going right to left, up to down, clockwise or otherwise? If you analyse your handwriting you will see that you always write each letter the same way, without conscious thought; Chinese should be no different to this.
The characters have an aesthetic beauty of their own, probably because they used to be scribed artistically with a brush. If you write them in the correct manner your calligraphy will look better, even using a biro.
There is no alphabet in Chinese so one of the methods of looking up characters in a dictionary is by the number of strokes. If you are not writing using the correct number of strokes you won't have a hope of using such a dictionary.
Having said all this, I suppose I should explain the rules of writing!
Horizontal strokes should always be written from left to right:
Vertical strokes should be written from top to bottom:
Boxes are written with three strokes. Start with the left edge, then one continuous stroke for the top and right edge. Then close the box with the base:
"Hook" strokes are made by doing a vertical stroke down and flicking up at the end to form the hook. eg the centre stroke in:
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