Cantonese pronunciation: Cantonese six tones
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- Опубліковано 3 лют 2013
- In this lesson you will learn Cantonese pronunciation and its romanization. To pronounce a Chinese word correctly in Cantonese, you need to learn a Cantonese romanization scheme. Here, the Natural Cantonese romanization scheme is used. You will learn how to pronounce a Chinese character in Cantonese by understanding the Cantonese pronunciation components, namely, the initial, the final, and the tone.
A more detailed discussion about Cantonese pronunciation and its relation with Cantonese romanization, particularly the six fundamental Cantonese tones, can be found:
www.freehongkong.net/cantonese...
You're the first person who's been able to explain this to me. There are no falling tones and the difference in the rising tones and the difference in the flat tones are only because they're relative to each other in pitch. That explains what I've been hearing in the language. It really is music. Thank you for your work.
I noticed that when I saw a basic demonstration.
Wow. I am learning mandarin, and came here out of curiosity. In mandarin, there are four tones. I now have instant respect for anyone who has mastered cantonese tones. Very well taught lesson, btw.
SAME i can speak indonesia and english and now learning mandarin and somehow and up here
Very helpful, thank you. The musical part definitely helped me learn quicker on the tones, and I enjoyed the info you shared about the wrong numbering systems.
Thank you for this video. I lived in HK for a few years and could not get the tones down and could not learn Cantonese to the level that I wanted. This video and the way you express things make things very clear to me, and I can hear the tones and say them after some practice. I like the way you number the tones, but unfortunately I think we are stuck with the Sidney Lau/jyutping tones. Now that I have it down from your video, converting Sidney Lau/Jyutping tones is easy. But the way you number the tones finally got it into my head. Thanks for all your writing on your webpage as well.
Thank you for this as a beginner it has helped me a lot, its a language you have to feel, its so melodic and rhythmic.
I couldn't have been happier when you whipped out the guitar! I was about to ask if these tones could be compared to half steps on the chromatic scale.
+Cameron Kessler Not necessarily a half step higher. It depends on the speaker. However, I can manipulate the six tones in Cantonese to fit the pentatonic scale perfectly. No kidding! See, two of the tones are "sliding notes" (rising tones), so you don't need six different notes for the six tones. I have a theory of why the Cantonese Opera often follows the pentatonic scale. In fact, the pentatonic scale is also very popular in most Southeast Asian music. Take a look at the tone system of the Laos language (say in wikipeida) and you will see why! The Laos language also has six tones, which are slightly different from those in Cantonese though. The Laos language has falling tones that are not found in Cantonese.
+Cameron Kessler If I were you who happened to be in Hong Kong, I would start working as a volunteer or something. Or better still, stay in a host family or something if you are studying in Hong Kong. The only way to really learn Cantonese is to talk to people face to face. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. People may laugh at you, but I am sure they are not doing this with bad intentions. After all, most younger people in Hong Kong are pretty multicultural and friendly. As a matter of fact, even the uneducated people will soften over time, if they find that you are really trying to learn Cantonese out of your appreciation of their culture. Always ask native speakers whether you have spoken something incorrectly, both in terms of tones, grammar, and vocabulary. I am sure most "educated" people in Hong Kong would really try to help you.
omg after tons of videos i finally understand! your video is the best! thanks!
Thank you so much, this is exactly what I needed! I've been dabbling with learning Cantonese, but I just haven't put in the time to get the tones correct. This will jumpstart my learning!
As said before, Thank you so much, and keep up the good work:)
Thank you so much for doing this! Your lessons are very clear and helpful. Love the subtle humour-- I laughed at the chi jor sin, mo mun tai and lei ho yeung sui part ahahah. That is the beauty of cantonese.
Thank you so much, the guitar really helped its amazing!!! Subscribed!
Woah this really helps! this has been confusing me for ages, I've never thought of it like notes on a scale before, thanks!
Thanks a lot for these good video ^^ i'm in love with HK and i've been learning Cantonese from myself and ur videos help me a lot, i watch them all :D!
this is what i've been looking for! thank you!!
great guitar approach, thanks
Just remember to convert other people's tone denotation to my system, when you follow my episodes!
Their 1 2 3 4 5 6 become my 1 2 3 5 6 4
Good luck.
Your theory is scientific and correct. The popular theory is incorrect regarding which of the forth tone and six tone is higher, which confused me for a long time. I suspected the sixth tone was the lowest and the forth tone did not sound falling.
Thank you so much for this video.
Great lesson! I always thought it was weird how the tones were numbered in other romanizations, this is much more logical! I personally like the phonetics of jyut ping... Probably because that's what I'm used to. Really loved the nemonic. :) Just stumbled on your channel, looking forward to more lessons! :D
This is great! I'm a 44 year old BBC that has let his Cantonese go to pot, but now I am clawing back my knowledge and understanding of the language. There is so much good stuff on Cantonese learning on youtube. Going crazy no problem - genius!
your a 44 year old british broadcasting corporation?
No, I'm an abstract entity that corrects trolls grammatical errors - it should be 'you're' not 'your'. Furthermore, how about implementing some capitalizing into your rather slapdash use of the beautiful English language.
+bovinicide Okay okay i understand what you mean but i'm generally just interested in what you are meaning by bbc!
British Born Chinese.
bovinicide ah right okay thanks
Watched your cantonese cuss words.,made me laugh, havent heard that for a long time, brings back memories when i was in HK when we were young..good times.Good to see this on youtube..Ho yea!!
WHOA... im Singaporean cantonese and i never knew this!
Thanks a lot for your lesson, however, it is still hard for me to clarify tone 1 3 5 6 because they all sound similar for me. I am from Vietnam and in my languages , it also has 6 tones , they are " - ` ~ ? . and ' " however, they are clearly to identify. How shot pitch of tone 3 5 and 6 ?
Thank you. Trying to understand at least a 'little' bit of Cantonese and having a very hard time with it.
Lei how ma fan ah tui lei lau mau ka chau hai !!
Can you tell us what is the most common romanization method? Your method is so helpful and I wish I could rely on it, but in the end I would perhaps want to convert it to the intonations most used on the internet, which are in numbers.
This was very helpful. If anyone reads this, I live in New York and I want to go to a school to learn Cantonese. Does anyone know of any good schools in New York that teach Cantonese?
I am glad it helps!
I'm learning Cantonese from you even though it's my mother tongue.
The trainer is so nice
11:53
"you are very ugly" should be "nei4 ho2 yeung2 sui3" o.o
Thank you for this! This has made my life much easier as a musician and the song using the six tones was hilarious :D! Just a small correction maybe: on the document you wrote it was in the key of C major, but the notes you gave seem to belong to the pentatonic scale of G major (i think anyway... because when I play the G chord after the pattern, i hear the resolution).
His riff uses the natural notes DEGAB. All of these notes are in the C Major scale, so he is correct, the key C Major. These natural notes, DEGAB, are, as you have correctly identified, are also in the G Major pentatonic scale (GABDE), but that scale is in the key of G Major, not C Major. There are no pentatonic keys; each pentatonic scale is in the key of that scale. For this riff in the key of C Major, the pentatonic scale has the natural notes CDEGA. This riff does not have these notes so it is not a C pentatonic scale. This 8--note riff, BABGEGED, has 5 distinct tones, so it is a pentatonal 8-note riff.
He could also have said this riff is in the keys of G Major, as the natural notes BAGED are also in the G Major scale. However, his focus is that the tones are successively lower, with 2 and 4 sliding up towards the immediately antecedent tone. And it’s all relative, so it can be in any key, and it isn’t really matter if pentatonic, augmented, diminished, harmonic, or melodics result as context, intent, body language, and facial expressions will also assist the listener to understand the words,even if the tones are accidentally sharp or flat.
Could you do a video and clarify in what situations it is ok to exchange the 'L' sound for the 'N' sound and vice versa. For example all of my Cantonese learning materials says 'Nay ho' whereas my girlfriend and the rest of her family say 'Lay ho'
I've noticed that people from Hong Kong never use the 'N' sound so why are we being told to use it in learning material? I have stopped using the 'N' sound now because people from Hong Kong think it's weird.
Is it interchangeable?
U r a genius
i checked out your 自由香港 website and i think it's extremely helpful. My question is that i can't really tell the difference between 隐(yan2) and 引(yan4). I think they sound extremely similar.
Inspiring Languages Both 隱 yan2 and 忍 yan4 are rising tone words. However, the former has a higher average pitch than the latter. 隱 yan2 as in 隱者 yan2 je2 have both 隱 and 者 with the same starting and ending pitches. 引 yan4 has a lower starting and ending ptiches than 隱 yan2. For example 引誘 yan4 yau4 with both 引 and 誘 having the same starting and ending pitches. This is obviously different from 忍誘 yan2 yau4 with the first word having high starting and ending pitches.
The tone system of Mandarin is much more primitive than most other languages (other people tend to use the word dialects, but I will say languages) in China. I analyzed one of the Sichuan languages last time and found 7 tones. It has the 6 tones that are found in Cantonese plus a falling tone!
Mandarin is a really bad language with too many Chinese characters having the same pronunciation because of its poor tone system. It has only two flat tones, one sharp falling tone, and one rising tone.
interesante
Hit Canto popular songs written all the time, that's why Cantonese will always exist as it is a main part of Chinese culture.
has every word these 6 tones and meanings?
Or are there any words you can speak however you like?
Most Chinese characters have a single tone (one of the six Cantonese tones) attached to each of them in Cantonese. However, some Chinese characters can be pronounced in more than one tone. E.g. 鑿 (meaning dig) commonly pronounced as jok5. However, it can be pronounced as jok1 as in 鑿你個頭 knock on your head and jok2 五鑿 someone who digs graves.
ok I see! Thank you
Thank you for teaching Cantonese. Most Cantonese lessons is for beginners and very few lessons for intermediate or advanced. But you are the best for intermediate.
I have one questions: Why do you pronounce "L" for N words. Example: Computer is "Din No", but you say "Din Lo". You do that with other N words as well. Why??
Cantonese pronunciation is beginning to change. Some people find it more natural to use L instead of N. Another example is the word 我 ‘ngoh’ where the ‘ng’ at the start of the word is not pronounced at all.
Thanks for your complement.
usefull
its confusing, all the other videos that I had watched about six tones mentioned the 5th tones to be sliding tone only in this video its different.
The 4th and 5th are sliding, one falling and one rising. Only 1st 3rd and 6th are flat.
Also, as a native Cantonese speaker, I know how the character "唔" (ng4) sounds like. However, when i compare it with the way you teach, i feel it should be a ng6 instead of ng4. Thanks for your help!
Inspiring Languages Don't follow the tone numbering system of Yale or Jyutping cause they don't allow you to rank the relative pitches of the six Cantonese tones properly.
LearnCantoneseFast if not Jyutping then what system? I always put Jyutping in the first place because i thought it was more... precise
Q36BN For English speakers, IPA is not the way to go for learning Cantonese. BTW, Jyutping is not truly IPA anyway. The worst of all, Jyutping similar to all other romanization schemes has a wrong tone numbering system, simply because the so called Cantonese linguists have no knowledge about the correct pitch ranking of the six tones in Cantonese. They believe the tone system in Cantonese originated from the so-called "Chinese language's" 平、上、去 system, when in fact they are WRONG! There is no falling tone and the pitch ranking is crucial in Cantonese!
LearnCantoneseFast I'm not English speaker, I'm from Poland, my language is quite flexible when it comes to pronounce different languages. It's just that i thought Jyutping is better than Yale.
Is there a better system which has a correct tones ands so on? I can't believe such widely known systems are wrong... strange o_0
Q36BN I am not using Yale. I am using Sidney Lau with the tone numbering system rearranged. Sidney Lau used this initial-final system for teaching the English speaking police officers in Hong Kong who were originally from the U.K. I adopted Sidney Lau for several other reasons too. For instance, there are a lot of descendants of Hong Kong people who were emigrated to countries like the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Using something that is more "English-like" will help them better.
黐咗線冇問題😜 Great!
Is there a reason that textbooks and other Cantonese resources include falling tones ? I see a lot that say there are 2 sets pf each (flat riskng falling)? Is this common in the West?
Supposedly only the Jyutping and Yale romanizations use 6 tones, whereas Cantonese uses 9. Yet you have used 6 here against your claims that there is no falling tones in (Cantonese) . So what exactly is the correct format?
It is politics. They try to mislead people so that everyone will wrongly believe that Cantonese and Mandarin have the same origins! In fact, Cantonese's tone system is more similar to those of other South East Asian Countries. Most of the so-called "dialects" south of Yangtse River have tone systems that are different from Mandarin. Mandarin is more similar to Tibetan. Both of them do not rely on pitches to differentiate words with the same initial and final.
Thanks for your response, great full to hear from some one on land overseas, or who has lived there before. Reminds me to brush up on my geography too.
The lecturer is talking crazy, man. All tones sound same to me.
Just kidding! Thank you for the video! I will study Cantonese till I am able to sing hen foon nei by Beyond.
So this is why Chinese people generally have perfect pitch
Hi there, as a native Cantonese speaker and have learned some knowledge about phonetic of Cantonese in Uni I have to point out that there is a serious mistake on how you speak and mark the tones: You've got all the six tones in the video, but in an incorrect order.
The six tones should be 因=jan1 隱=jan2 印=jan3 人=jan4 引=jan5 刃=jan6. When you look up any dictionary it always shows the tones this way.
So 人 is the 4th tone, not 6th; 引 is the 5th tone, not 4th; and 刃 is the 6th tone, not 5th.
It might be confusing learners when you match the tones to a wrong number.
I always thought Cantonese only had 4 tones, then after taking mandarin classes I thought it had only had 5 tones, x.x my Cantonese is so broken.
Do you mind to provide me how to say 'Tuna' in Cantonese? Anyway, i use to speak Cantonese.. And i listened to your lesson.. It is funny when u teach, Lei hou yeung sui hahaha!!
吞拿魚 tan1 la6 yu2
Why do you say "Lay" (for "You") instead of "Nay" ????
+steve preston It depends on the accent. For example, HongKong people pronounce it as "lay".
Have you ever considered writing a book on this? Maybe you could make money off of it too
LearnCantoneseFast
Hello, I loved you actually related the tones to a musical melody. But I think you're confusing the tones... when I look for Cantonese words by its pronunciation the 5th tone is the low rising one, while the 6th tone is the flat lowest tone and the 4th tone is a low falling tone. I think the reason of this confusion is that the 4th falling tone can also be pronounced as a VERY LOW FLAT tone, lower than the 6th tone, so you would think the 6th tone (described as the lowest) would be the 4th tone. If you look for words in databases like CantoDict, you'll notice that the 5th tone is the rising one and the other tones (4 and 6) will be mixed up in comparison to your system, for example: 可以, ho2 ji5; 你, nei5; 月, jyut6; 行, haang4, etc.
There is NO falling tone in Cantonese. You are using the wrong numbering system of the tones based on Yale or Jyutping. These systems ignored the relative pitch ranking of the six tones of Cantonese and hence are useless.
@@LearnCantoneseFast I was confused about the 4th tone in Cantonese, the Chinese and English wiki page have different description for tone numbers in Cantonese. Turn out in hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/43494/1/27205.pdf?accept=1 p. 187, stated that the low falling tone exists in Hong Kong Cantonese
因1
隱2
印3
人4
引5
刃6
THANK YOU OH GOD I'VE BEEN TRYING TO PRONOUNCE 衙 ALL DAMN DAY
i am a foreigner and i lived in hong kong for more than 30 years now. people say that i can speak like locals. i want to say that no one can ever learn cantonese just by studying because there is not a single ideal way to either teach or learn it.
This language is not logical so you can't use brain to learn it logically.
I think it is all about memorizing each and every word and also how and where you use the word in a sentence. Even if you use a wrong pitch/tone word in a sentence, it is almost negligible.
Well, not totally true cause learning Cantonese is like learning music. You can memorize and reproduce the pitch pattern (and initials and finals) of a phrase or a sentence without understanding any theory about Cantonese tones. Similarly, you can memorize any music patterns without understanding any music theory. Without any knowledge about Cantonese tones; however, it is very easy to commit mistakes without even noticing it. Go to my "common mistake..." episode to understand why this is so.
College Rodent i saw your whole video but there is something you cannot understand why people may not agree with you is when you said "it doesn't matter" whereas that is the place where it really matters for others.
so it is solely your own perspective and also for those who can understand your perspective.
maybe tomorrow there will be someone who claims that learning cantonese is like learning how to climb a mountain and he also gives a structural lecture like yours,but then people who understands it will agree and those who don't understand will disagree.
in the end, it all depends if a newbie to cantonese can really perfect it with a given way. and i think it is not possible. the only most important thing which is required is memorizing.
There is no logic in the numbers of the tones under other romanization methods. The only reason why they did that was because originally, it was thought that there were 8 tones in Cantonese, namely, 陽平, 陽上, 陽去, 陽入, 陰平, 陰去, 陰上, 陰入. But 入 whether 陽入 or 陰入 are nothing more than the global stop finals. So, some so-called linguists maintained 陽平, 陽上, 陽去, 陰平, 陰去, and 陰上, but they didn't know that these six tones were related to pitches! Also, 去 actually does not exist in Cantonese. They are messed up.
Well, the Hongkongese pronunciation of the word "你" is lei4, whereas traditional Cantonese should be nei4. nei4 is the more correct "Canton" accent. The Canton accent is also stronger in terms of its nasal sounds of "n" and "ng", etc. Somehow true "native" Cantonese people manage to have more "resonance" with their nose when they speak. I am a native Hongkongese, not a native Cantonese, cause my parents were not originally from Guangdong.
I have no time to practice your class.
Great lesson. I am a native Cantonese speaker and I never learned this. Great job. Too bad Cantonese is a dying language. RIP
cantonese is dying? is mandarin taking over it?
Tantum Mandarin has already taken over.
+yackawaytube how so? hong kong still use it as their native language and many other places in
south china. im pretty sure that roughly 80 million people!
Many people in Canton speak Mandarin. Mandarin is the business language in south China.
yackawaytube Yet they only use it for business and nothing else.
其實係1因2隱3印4人5引6刃
得以上的1和4係平聲，其他係仄聲
得以上的1和4係平聲，其他係仄聲
得以上的1和4係平聲，其他係仄聲
Your ranking of 1 to 6 is meaningless and artificial because they DO NOT represent pitches in a decending order. It will never help foreigner learn Cantonese properly.
This video is so cute
I don't understand a thing he is saying
your tones are wrong
Horrible lesson