Thank you hugely. There is so much on the All Languages Resources site that I shall be disappearing there for hours now!
It is a wonderful resource!
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People are attracted to reading because it’s the only reliably accessible multi modiality but I agree that it’s no substitute for 1:1 with a native.
Revising what’s happening here: You need a channel for delivering meaning but you need that other channel of info to give you Comprehensible Input.
Thank you so much for sharing your battles with those sounds that aren’t in English @LynnKelly.
I’m learning Cantonese.
As an example, we have ‘caat’ in Jyutping (re: https://cantolounge.com/jyutping-chart/ )
Even IPA isn’t great because it’s similar to other letters. Romanisation with pinyin and jyutping as a beginner is very bad. Having that letter C and T is a massive obstacle we’ve just given ourselves to undo. Just because it’s a particular sequence, that’s far from fully annilating the association.
Going back to the example,
I find ‘caat’ very hard to pronounce. I have to lock my tongue to my lips and yet do something that I can only describe to English speakers here as VAGUELY close to a C or T sound. Maybe even a bit of H. The thing is, even by describing it this way I’m creating errors. What we need to do is go to the mouth and PHONOLOGY:
I totally agree with @Liam because of this. Creating one of those sounds accurately is a start. In tandem with that I think we need to train our ear A LOT to be able to HEAR those sounds accurately for what they are. That is a foundation.
As a counter-example, my Chinese English students can’t hear the end of words, so from that seemingly minor issue, they lose so much of the language.
Thus: Minimal pairs and listening exercises.
I started off with Fluent Forever’s Cantonese Anki listening deck. That’s a must for starting out. Now that I have that and what with being in the country, I at least have enough listening under my belt where I think I can play with Rosetta Stone or Duolingo and not damage myself too much.
So, I suggest the mnemonics need to GO BACK TO THE MOUTH and nuke that romanisation into orbit until B1/B2 whereby you can use it with an autocomplete keyboard for faster writing.
So I’m going to suggest a new starting point:
Imagine putting those Bofomofo characters into your mouth in the positions in which the vocal apparatus is to make those souunds.
Let me try it using familiar sounds:
ㄈ = f
ㄋ = n
ㄇ = m
ㄚ = …what? This vowel looks the same as a capital Y??
and m is the same as -m??
Anyway,
ㄊ = -t (seems it’s the same as t in English, only unreleased)
So, story to spell/pronounce FAN without IPA:
ㄈ = propping the mouth open, f for fan
a: (low front unrounded vowel)
ㄋ = looks like a NOSE, which is fortunate because the tongue curls up to the roof of the mouth, close to the tongue
Now, moving onto those new sounds:
ㄑ = I’m linking this symbol to the font of my teeth… but the association isn’t strong
ㄊ = I imagine this in the back of my mouth
I need help on this though guys!
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I studied Cantonese for a while. @StopUserNameReuse I suppose you know, but for the rest of the crew here, it has some difficulties compared to Mandarin:
- more tones, and some are extremely difficult.
- it is more a spoken language. It means they write in “formal Chinese”, or just plain Mandarin.
- the various romanizations are less standarized than Mandarin. It means that if you ask a person in the street to write the pronunciation of something, they will write different things. This is seen also in the fact that even the native speakers don’t type the language in the phone, but use other input methods like drawing the characters or oral dictation.
- native speakers population size, which means less resources (and this language is not precisely encouraged by the government, both in Canton and in Hong Kong.)
- it has an extra set of characters if one wants to write “spoken Cantonese”. 有冇？
- the ending in consonants t and k are difficult to master.
But it has less sounds than Mandarin, especially those like zh and ch.
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One of my favourite Cantonese songs:
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Don’t all the Chinese languages use the standard way of writing it?
I read somewhere that Mandarin, Cantonese, Fuzhounese, Hokkienese, etc… can perfectly read the same newspaper, sounding totally different of course.
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It is not that the various languages use a standard writing. But the speakers of those languages do. Usually they write Mandarin or a very formal version of Mandarin.
Mandarin speakers normally write and speak in the same way.
The speakers of the other languages still have to learn the vocabulary, syntax and characters of Mandarin.
It is as if Portuguese, French, Italian, Spaniards and Romanians they all write in French, but still speak in their own language.
For some centuries in Europe they would write in formal Latin, but still speak in their local languages. I suppose is something similar.
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To oversimplify (because I don’t understand enough to do otherwise) there are basically two forms of the Chinese script - and they can be read in any language, but, of course, are usually read in one of the many Chinese dialects. There is the Traditional Script (used in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) and the Simplified (not simple!) script used in Mainland China and elsewhere. There is a lot of overlap.
So, yes, lots of people who cannot understand each others’ speech can read the same newspaper.
Happy to be corrected on this!
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Nah, wouldn’t be the same, because they’re all phonetic.
This is the only advantage they have (considering how difficult to memorize all those characters) : that they don’t have a phonetic reading, so… they could very well read the same “word” differently.
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I asked “google”
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My comparison is not perfect, but still if you read a book in Chinese with Cantonese pronunciation, that is not Cantonese at all. That is formal Chinese with a certain pronunciation, or even Mandarin with Cantonese pronunciation. It would be similar to (not exactly the same) reading French with Italian pronunciation or with Spanish pronunciation.
I don’t need to ask Google 
this is a reality I face in daily life.
Sorry if I sound arrogant, I’m just sharing my experience, even if it might be limited.
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This is the complete paragraph of that excerpt I posted
Despite the large differences among Chinese dialects, there is one thing in common—they all share the same writing system based on Chinese characters. However, the same character is pronounced differently depending on which dialect one speaks. Let’s take 我 for example, the word for “I” or “me.” In Mandarin, it is pronounced “wo.” In Wu, it is pronounced “ngu.” In Min, “gua.” In Cantonese, “ngo.” You get the idea.
If the last part is true, then what is stated in the first part, is the most plausible “scenario”
I’d ask you @Liam is it true that “I” in Cantonese is “ngo” but I guess it must sound similar to “wo…” or “wo” with a Cantonese pronunciation.
I guess we need @Antelex at least to chime in. 
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This is true.
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I think you guys are starting to mix a few too many things now. Let’s go back to @Liam’s second point…
…and put that into context with what @vector was asking…
Which is really two questions now and then @LynneKelly’s answer to the other question…
Let’s quickly compare Traditional and Simplified using the book title that @Liam posted above…
記憶宫殿
记忆宫殿
…the 3rd and 4th character are the same in either and the 1st and 2nd could be made out from context. On the other hand, if you look at the character for dragon… 龍 / 龙… it’s really not that easy anymore. It’s similar to uppercase and lowercase Greek letters when you normally write in Latin script. The majority of the uppercase letters are pretty much identical, the lowercase ones you’d have to study first: https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~hongwang/AMS10/Week_1/Greek_symbols.html
Now, it’s not like Mandarin uses simplified and Cantonese uses traditional either. The Cantonese in Hong Kong uses traditional but everything across the checkpoint in mainland China (say Guangzhou) uses simplified characters instead. This also happens the other way around with Taiwan using traditional characters for Mandarin.
Does that mean people can read the same newspaper? Well, yes and no… if you use traditional characters in your daily life, chances are you’ll know simplified characters as well. If you’re from the North of China and thus use simplified characters all day you will likely not know any traditional characters. Different story in the south because of its proximity to Hong Kong. Similar to how depending on the region of Switzerland, people will know French, German, or Italian.
So, someone from Taiwan or Hong Kong can most likely read a Beijing (in the north) newspaper. Somebody from Beijing may not necessarily be able to read a newspaper from Taipei or Hong Kong. Note that 1.3 billion people in mainland China use simplified compared to the 30 million people that use traditional if you add together Hong Kong and Taiwan.
However, the problem with the Hong Kong newspaper is not that it’s in Cantonese, because people from Taiwan will be able to read it even though they speak Mandarin. It’s because the written language is standardized. At least to the extend that an American can read a British newspaper and vice versa.
And finally back to at @Liam’s point about Cantonese being more of a spoken language. Somebody from Taiwan and somebody from Hong Kong without knowledge of the other language will not be able to understand each other when they speak.
You can find written Cantonese just as much as you can find written Austrian German of course, but the norm for official documents would be Standard Chinese and Standard German. So yes, there might be text written that can’t be understood but it happens very rarely; however, that is not due to the fact that Cantonese is read with a Mandarin pronunciation… it’s because Standard Chinese is the lingua franca.
That’s not a good argument. Romance languages are phonetically consistent within that particular language. If you compare “de nada” in both Spanish and Portuguese, you’ll find that the “d” sounds are different. I’d say that somebody who learned Spanish as an L2 to a B2/C1 level, will immediately start out at a A2/B1 reading when studying Portuguese next.
I think the point that @Liam was trying to make here can be found in this video comparing Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese when written. That is kind of similar to what different Sinitic languages compare…
That might take it a bit far actually, because French is the odd one out… but if you said that they all agreed to write in Italian instead, I’d agree completely to your comparison. Italian and French share 89% lexical similarity; however, when spoken Italian is close to Spanish than it is to French.
Also and lastly, it’s linguists that call them Chinese language. Many Chinese people will actually refer to them as other dialects.
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Thanks for the reply!
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Well, I meant to say “they’re read phonetically”. Of course they’re read differently in each language.
And is like this for basically all written languages, except for Chinese and Japanese (when not using the JP phonetic alphabets)
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But that is something that is more to do with the writing system and not the language itself. @Liam’s point was more about French as a lingua franca when it comes to written communication. That does not turn a text written in Mandarin into Cantonese when somebody from Hong Kong reads it in a Cantonese accent.
Hiragana and katakana are not just phonetic alphabets. They serve a purpose and are not freely interchangeable. Of course, you can use katakana to emphasize something that would normally be written in hiragana. Similarly, when used as furigana, you can use hiragana to give the reading of a less know kanji (Chinese character) as you’ll find in subway stations a lot for example.
But the purpose of hiragana is to conjugate your Chinese character or negate it, etc. Also, in Chinese, there is only one reading for the character. In Japanese you’ll have multiple reading of a character…
…so Japanese doesn’t fit your description. Yes, for Chinese characters like 我 you can say…
…but in Japanese the reading of the character depends on context not on a speakers accent.
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Is this in reference to the title of the topic here – Learning Chinese? In China the official language is Standard Chinese and if you have a look at https://www.un.org/en/our-work/official-languages you’ll find that…
[t]here are six official languages of the UN. These are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Generally, when somebody refers to Chinese as a language, they mean Standard Chinese not all languages spoken in China. Just how English does not refer to the languages spoken in England. Secondly, when somebody says learning XYZ, they probably mean a language and not a language family. Obviously, learning German refers to the German language and not the Germanic languages.
Now you could argue that German and Germanic are not the same word, but you can’t turn Chinese into Chinesic, however you could say Sinitic languages if you’d like to refer to the Chinese language family. It is also clear that nobody is talking about Occitan or Catalan when they say they want to learn French, even though both of those are also spoken in France.
Going the other way around, saying just Mandarin you are referring to the entire group of Mandarin Chinese language varieties. Standard Chinese (Putonghua) would be Standard Mandarin, which is based on Standard Northern Mandarin. Some would say Standard Beijing Mandarin but since Standard Mandarin in only based on it, it’s probably better to refer to the region as to not make it sound like “Beijing” and “Standard” are the same thing.
Now, why is based on so important? Because Standard Mandarin is to Chinese what the Mid-Atlantic accent - Wikipedia is to English. It’s made up and there were no native speakers when China standardized the language after WWII. So just like actors where training in this mix of RP and Standard American.
If you were to compare the (Standard) Mandarin spoken in Beijing and Taiwan, you’d find that it’s a bit similar to American English and British English; the former being rhotic and the latter being non-rhotic. Beijing Mandarin in a similar way adds -er to their words whereas Standard Mandarin does not have this feature.
Park the car in Harvard Yard ← Standard American Accent (rhotic)
Pahk the cah in Havahd Yahd ← Boston Accent (non rhotic)
Similar to French not referring to Occitan or Catalan, there are ~900 million Mandarin speakers and ~60 million Cantonese speakers. So what do you think they mean when they say Chinese without specifying any further… Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, or Min?
Bottom line, Chinese when referred to as a language means Standard Chinese which is the English name for the official Language of China. If somehow dropping the “Standard” from it and calling it just Chinese is an issue, you can’t correct it by saying Mandarin instead of Standard Mandarin.
ps: I hope it’s okay that I referred to the two countries above as Germany and France instead of the Federal Republic of Germany and the French Republic. 
pps: Had a quick look… Yiddish is a Germanic language. You got it listed under Other Languages (completely off-topic)
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Going back to the topic of the thread “Learning Chinese”, I want to write how I use “mnemonics” to learn Chinese. In this moment I am in one of those much feared plateaus.
I am a firm believer of the “stupid method” (I don’t remember where I read about it). It consists in listening more, speaking more, reading more and writing more. At the same time, I try to do both “random learning” and “deliberate practice.” Random learning means picking a random article in a magazine, a song, a documentary, or talking to people in the street about just anything.
Deliberate practice for me means choosing and area, a field, an ability, and focusing on it, tracking progress in a measurable way, as much as possible.
When I began to study Chinese I read that Mateo Ricci took 20 years to learn Chinese (whatever that means) and I decided first to study Chinese for 20 years and then to decide again. It means it is a long term race. Very long term.
In concrete, I use or have used “mnemonics”, together with other methods in the following way:
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I use spaced repetition. I have used Anki, Remnote, or just trackers in a notebook or excel.
2
I have a system that helps me to describe and memorize Hanzi (characters), based on characters (persons) of one of these fantasy worlds that appear in movies (let’s call it a bestiary). I think that it is very useful to be able to describe completely Hanzi with words in a precise way. For this I use a mix of radicals (and it is useful to know the names of the radicals) together with the bestiary, and the other parts of the character. For instance 隹 is the main character of the movie. Let’s call him Luke Skywalker. 崔 is then Luke ascending to a mountain. 催 is another person pushing Luke to climb the mountain, 觀 is Luke hiding under a bush 艸 with binoculars 吅 looking 見 at something. I have many parts of characters associated with characters from those movies: 支，止，殳，etc. This has been super useful to me. It makes the content more memorable. If I see I character that I don’t know, or I want to learn more about, I try to describe it in a memorable way (Darth Vader drinking water on top of a tree).
I don’t use movement of fingers to describe characters.
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I use another system for pronunciation. I divide a syllable (for instance, chuan, ming, le, dao, etc.) into the first consonant, the rest of the sounds (middle and ending), and the tone.
The first consonant is connected to a Disney movie (this is for Mandarin, for Cantonese I made one based on Pixar movies.)
The middle+ending refers to a job, for instance: silversmith, opera singer, police officer, etc.
The tone is indicated by a character of a movie: 1st tone main male character, 2nd tone main female character, 3rd tone evil or antagonistic character, 4th sidekick. (Cantonese was more difficult.)
Example:
ㄒ (x in pinyin) is Sword in the Stone. (Yes, x is not easy)
ㄧㄠ (“iao”) is clown or mime in Paris.
First tone is Arthur, second tone Madame Mim, third tone, Arthur’s brother, fourth tone Merlin.
Sometimes I use this to create stories about a certain situations. For instance, all the characters that can be pronounced as xiao1. Imagine Arthur dressed as a mime performing by the Seine river.
Since I don’t want just to learn isolated characters, I use words and not just individual hanzi.
This method has been extremely useful. Among other reasons, it has been effective to differentiate groups of characters whose sound I tend to mix (chuan, zhuan, chuang, zhuang, or xiao and shao, etc).
Focusing on a certain area, in both methods described in 2 and 3 tend to unblock areas that were blocking learning in a certain direction out of lack of clarity or confusion.
This system began as a PAO but eventually evolved into this.
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During these weeks, I am using memory palace to learn text verbatim.
I have tried other things with less success.
I have written more extensively in other posts, so I don’t want to write in more detailed way here to avoid repetition.
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Blockquot Generally, when somebody refers to Chinese as a language, they mean Standard Chinese not all languages spoken in China.
Thank you for this long explanation - I found it really useful. Now I can be more specific. It also helped with the two courses I am using.
Beijing Mandarin in a similar way adds -er to their words whereas Standard Mandarin does not have this feature.
One does this and the other doesn’t and I haven’t been able to get a clear explanation before, although I gathered it was a regional pronunciation thing.
Much appreciated.
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Going back to the topic of the thread “Learning Chinese”, I want to write how I use “mnemonics” to learn Chinese…
This is hugely useful @Liam . I would prefer repetition to lack of detail, so please don’t resist saying anything you want in case you repeat it. I really appreciate your long and specific responses. So much to think about in this thread!
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