#3 | How to remember Cantonese Tones
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 มิ.ย. 2017
- Following our introduction to tones, some students have told me that tones are difficult to remember. We’ll go over three additional ways to think about tones, and we’ll cover two of those ways in this video. In particular, tones can be broadly categorized into two groups, making it easier to remember, there’s a particular order I recommend you remember tones in, and you can memorize tones very easily with representative numbers.
Don’t forget to turn on subtitles, or refer to the transcript under "More -- Transcript" to read a textual version of the video.
Thanks for dropping by! 多謝光臨 do1 ze6 gwong1 lam4!
P.S. Please visit cantolounge.com for even more lessons and useful stuff to help you learn Cantonese.
Even most native speakers - let alone foreign learners - find it hard to distinguish Tone 2 from Tone 5.
Mind elaborating more on this?
I've been trying my hardest to learn Cantonese (but exceptionally failing) and glad to have found your channel!!!
Thanks for dropping Alie, really appreciate it! Feel free to drop a line here (cantolounge.com/cantonese-questions/) if you have any questions. Good luck! :)
It has got to be one of the hardest in the world. Also in Hong Kong they use traditional characters. Has to be nearly impossible lol.
分fan1 flat
粉fan2 rising
訓fan3 flat
---
墳fan4 flat
憤fan5 rising
份fan6 flat
---
I've always thought of 4-6 as a repeat of 1-3 but lower in pitch.
This has always helped me memorize the 6 tones, just repeating the 6 words in a row.
And just remember 1-3(陰) being higher pitch and 4-6(陽) being lower pitch.
idk how to diffrent 4 and 6 tones
@@dvn.b__samu-han The first 3 tones go from high pitch to low pitch. The last 3 tones go from low pitch to higher pitch. So 6 is higher than 4 a bit.
@@Aznbomb3r Interesting, any reason why it's not from high pitch to low pitch all the way through? That was the first thing that confused me little bit. I was expecting it to be: "1,2,3 .. 6,5,4" - so you would go from your highest tone to your lowest.
@@jakubbriza7274 It actually works fine this way if you think about it this way. +3 +2 +1 -3 -2 -1. So high pitch goes from high to low and low pitch goes from low to high.
Edit - would also like to add that this is probably one of the few tonal systems in Asian languages that makes a bit of sense. If you try to learn Vietnamese or Minnan/Hokkien, their tones are everywhere and not in any nice order, or it could just be my bias or ignorance.
ohhh remembering by how numbers are said in canto is a fantastic device to remember. because counting to ten is like singing a song for me.
This is an amazing series and you are a great teacher. I wish your website was still online :(
Excellent! Thanks!
Thank you so so so much...very useful ,simple way to memorize...❤
All a very interesting commentary on the relationship between language and culture.
This is very clever! thank you very much for your video
one thing is that i find the Magic Six quite confusing n I am a native Cantonese speaker. I guess it'd be even more so for beginners. I do recognise that the tones of the Magic Six correspond to their respective "tonal numbers", but they are both represented by using Arabic numerals. Perhaps, using other representation, like Roman numerals, may be clearer. Just my two cents. Overall, a great lesson.
That's interesting to hear, I've been hearing that more among students lately, and I wonder if there's something that can be done about it. Some people prefer using diacritical marks to tone numbers for that reason, I think it just takes a bit of time getting used to, but I guess you can make an argument for the tone marks. I'll have a think about that.
Thanks for dropping by. :)
Great video, thank you
Thank you 😊 💓
多謝
you speak even better than many chinese outside guangzhou and hongkong
做的很好的内容，谢谢您！会经常来看的
道謝
I've just started to learn cantonese and I'm confused about the forth tone as some explain it as a flat tone while others say it's a falling tone similar to that in mandrin and also when I hear it in the end of a question it sounds like a rising tone!!
It's a flat tone in my ear - the fourth tone in Cantonese is NOT the fourth tone in Mandarin, they're very different! I'd refer you to our Jyutping Chart - have a listen for yourself and see whether or not the fourth tone is flat or not. cantolounge.com/jyutping-chart/
You can raise your voice at the end of a sentence to turn it into a question, but that doesn't change the original tone of the word!
I think that is more like a sound without energy, like if you are tired.
Actually, there used to be seven tones in Cantonese, with the first tone being pronounced differently, with 诗 being pronounced si1, like modern cantonese, but 思 being pronounced si, but with a tone like the fourth tone in mandarin. People usually just merge these together now though due to laziness.
How do you assign the romanization with the right tone? How do you put together the correct initial, vowel and coda to form the romanization
I would never be able to distinguish some of these tones. In Mandarin, the starting pitch isn't particularly important. It's just about recognizing the rise and fall of the pitch, and I already struggle with that.
As a Australian born Cantonese speaker. I have never learnt the tones. Grew up watching tvb 叮噹, Australia canto radio, Stephen chow movies. You just learn the colloquial words and phrases overtime. It kinda just rolls off the tongue. But then when if comes to learning spoken and written Chinese it becomes a mess because when watching tvb dramas the subtitles and written in standard Chinese not the colloquial Cantonese which ironically has Chinese characters, but not used because if a mandarin speaker was reading the Cantonese Chinese, the subtitles makes no sense. Eg. 唔係 is actually 不是 in mandarin Chinese but mandarin speakers would not understand 唔係 even though they're both Chinese. Weird eh? There's thousands of examples like that.
As someone speaking Cantonese from birth, i can't detect more than 4 tones. I can teach a foreigner Cantonese by just using 4 tones. And these are represented by the Cantonese numbers 4-9-2-3 which approximate the mandarin numbers 3-10-5-6. I speak Thai too. In my opinion, the 5 tones in Thai are very distinct. Four tones in Thai approximate the four tones in Mandarin except that there's another tone that is similar to mandarin's 2nd tone except that it climbs higher in pitch. Most westerners & those from non-tonal language groups will find tones very difficult to master! Won't blame you...
Where is the video for "Using Music as an aid for Cantonese tones"?
Here you go: th-cam.com/video/heFjF9Nsf2s/w-d-xo.html. :)
being tone deaf and trying to differentiate the pitch is kinda hard - idk if what I'm saying is consistent with what I'm hearing.
Good explanation, but it's still confusing :/
idk the diffrent of tones 4 and 6
I've referenced about 5 sources now explaining Cantonese tones and I have yet to find two that agree on it. I may be doomed... This is the first one I see that describes a tone as it sounding similar to another but like it's cut off.. 😕
Legendary video🧧🧧🧨
有一個香港話翻譯嗎
7ui
As a native Cantonese speaker, I don’t understand what he is saying at all...
D LG Why? Is he wrong ?
@@user-zm7lk2zk9t No, he’s not. It’s just that when one is already fluent in a language, said person does not need to trouble him or herself with these grammar/pronunciation mechanisms. For example, I was born in California and speak English as a native. But I could never identify what part of a sentence corresponds to a “past participle”, etc., if even one existed given a random sentence. I sucked at grammar and though I respect why grammar is necessary in preserving the structure of a language, I’ll leave that to the grammarians and linguists.
I spoke Cantonese at home with my parents, and I can honestly tell you that no one-neither in my immediate family nor my extended family-ever spoke about “tones” in Chinese even though the tones play a gigantic part in the language. Ignore them and the language becomes practically incomprehensible. But if I were to tell my mother about the Wade-Giles system or JyutPing and funny numbers that appear after romanizations, she wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what the heck they were. Videos like this are wonderful because Cantonese is in danger of being snuffed out because Mandarin will supplant it as the economically more relevant dialogue with time.
This video is perfectly fine and the techniques are great.
「五」嘅正音係 ng5 唔係 m5
Old Cantonese had nine tones. Cantonese from the mainland have seven tones. In Macau and Hong Kong only six tones are used.
No that's counting 3 checked tones which are the same as 3 of the other tones except they end in a consonant k,m,p etc
th-cam.com/video/NM7tXfXnCzM/w-d-xo.html
This channel has covered that information
@@evolutionated1125 -p -t -k. are the enders which make up the 7, 8, and 9th tone. However, 7, 8, and 9 are just a repeat of 1, 3, and 6.
For example, using Yale romanization.
即 jik1 or jik7
隻 jek3 or jek8
值 jik6 or jik9
Even though 1 and 7 are the same tone, the difference is that when you reach the end of the word, the tone cannot be extended.
Example, you can say 試 si3 like siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. But you cannot say 舌 sit3 as sittttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt. T is not a sound you can extend.
P and K are also sounds you cannot extend. So they were known as "half tones".
The saying is 九聲六調, 9 tones 6 pitches. There is simply no reason to teach 9 tones which complicates things when we can just teach 6 pitches.
@@Aznbomb3r that's what I said no?
@@evolutionated1125 You said K M P. That is wrong. M is a sound you can extend. Like Hammmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
There is only 3 hard consonant enders in Cantonese, that is P T and K.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I don't want to be your student, because I don't want to get Aids 😢
Huh?
It's a pun lol. Kinda like dark humor
Sorry, this video is really quite useless. His pronunciation is good though.