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The Cantonese Basic Course is a course in spoken Cantonese, with
the subject matter of the course dealing with daily life in Hong
Kong. Cantonese is the principal language of Kwangtung province in
Southeast China, parts of neighboring Kwangsi province, Hong Kong,
and Macao; it is also spoken by many people in Southeast Asia, and
is the original language of many Chinese-American, with some 50
million people in the world speaking it. It has many dialects, but
the Prestige variety, spoken in Canton, is standard, and is used
over a wide area, including Hong Kong, and these tapes are made in
the Prestige dialect. The course is divided into two levels; each
book has a handy glossary presenting a romanization, characters,
and a brief definition. It was designed for an intensive language
program of 25-30 class hours a week and uses all the basic
grammatical structures of the language and a vocabulary of
approximately 950 words. There are 30 lessons in the course, and
the rate of progress in an intensive course is expected to be
approximately 2 lessons per week, including time for review and
testing. Level One comes with 14 tapes or CDs and a book; Level
Two with 15 tapes and a book.
FSI Cantonese Basic
The Cantonese Basic Coarse is a course in spoken Cantonese, with the subject matter of the course dealing with daily life in Hong Kong. Cantonese is the principal language of Kwangtung province in Southeast China, parts of neighboring Kwangsi province, Hong Kong, and Macao; it is also spoken by many people in Southeast Asia, and is the original language of many Chinese-American, with some 50 million people in the world speaking it. It has many dialects, but the Prestige variety, spoken in Canton, is standard, and is used over a wide area, including Hong Kong, and these tapes are made in the Prestige dialect.
The course is divided into two levels; each book has a handy glossary presenting a romanization, characters, and a brief definition. It was designed for an intensive language program of 25-30 class hours a week and uses all the basic grammatical structures of the language and a vocabulary of approximately 950 words. There are 30 lessons in the course, and the rate of progress in an intensive course is expected to be approximately 2 lessons per week, including time for review and testing. Level One comes with 14 tapes or CDs and a book; Level Two with 15 tapes or CDs and a book.
Each lesson contains five sections: I) a Basic Conversation to be memorized; II) Notes; III) Pattern Drills, structural drills of the type in which the speaker's cue is the stimulus for the students' response; IV) Conversations for Listening, a listening comprehension section; and V) Say it in Cantonese: an English to Cantonese practice session, much of it in conversational question-answer form in which students apply what they have learned in the lesson. The early lessons in addition contain explanation and practice drills on pronunciation points, and some standard phrases for the students to learn to respond to when used by the teacher.
Objectives
The objectives of the course are to teach students to speak Standard Cantonese in the locales where Cantonese is spoken, to speak it fluently and grammatically, with acceptable pronunciation, within the scope of topics of daily life. The course was not designed to lay the groundwork for learning the written language. At the end of the course students will be able to buy things; talk on the telephone; ask and give directions; handle money; discuss events past, present, and future; make comparisons; talk about themselves and their families; tell time; order simple meals; talk with the landlord, doctor, servant, bellboy, cabdriver, waiter, sales-clerk; discuss what, when, where, why, who, how, how much. They will not be able to discuss politics or their jobs or other topics of a specialized nature.
Method
The method underlying these lessons is guided imitation, and the aim is automaticity. Ideally, one will have access to a teacher, who drills on the Cantonese in the text, providing an authentic model for the student to imitate. Statements on how the language is manipulated are included in the explanatory notes in the text, which may be supplemented by further discussions on the part of the teacher. As a supplement to class hours with a teacher, or as a replacement for them, students work with the audio recordings which approximate the classroom situation.
Language learning is over-learning. Through memorization of whole utterances, and substitution within and manipulation of these utterances, a student achieves the fluency and automaticity that are necessary for control of a language. Language learning involves acquiring a new set of habits, and these habits must become automatic. Just as the experienced driver performs the mechanics of driving unconsciously turning on the engine, shifting gears, applying the brakes, etc. and concentrates on where they are going, so the fluent speaker of a language is concerned with what they are saying rather than the mechanics of how they are saying it.
Course Construction
All the conversations and drills in this book were written by native Cantonese speakers working under the direction of an American linguist who specified which grammatical points to cover and what situations were required. The design of the text what to cover, what sequence to use in introducing new material, what limits to set on vocabulary, the write-ups of structure notes, types and layouts of pattern drills, and the contents of the English-to-Chinese translation sections, were done by the American linguist.
What we have done to handle the problem of limited structures and vocabulary is to plan the lessons so that certain topics and forms don't come up until rather late in the course. The words 'yesterday', 'today', and 'tomorrow', for example, don't occur until Lesson 16. Meanwhile the student has built up the grammatical structure and vocabulary to talk fluently on some subjects which don't involve these expressions and the complexities of verb structures that are involved with time-related sentences. For this reason the present text is not appropriate for use of students whose needs are for just a few phrases of Cantonese - it takes too long from that point of view to get to some of the phrases which a tourist, for example, wants to use right away. But the student who can study hard on an intensive program for four months and cover at least 26 of the 30 lessons, will then speak natural-sounding and grammatical Cantonese, and will be able to cope with most daily life situations in the language.
The student should note the following general suggestions and warnings:
- Always use normal speed.
Do not permit yourself to speak more slowly than the language model. The ability to understand slow, deliberate speech never heard outside of study is of little practical value. The aim of the student should be to learn Cantonese as it is spoken by the Cantonese - not an artificial educational dialect. - Review constantly, and do not go ahead too rapidly.
Remember that each new lesson presupposes thorough mastery of what has gone before. - Expect differences and be surprised at similarities.
Do not assume that the patterns of Cantonese will resemble those of English, or that distinctions made in English will be present in Cantonese. - Remember that usage, not logic, determines what is accepted in a
language.
A native speaker is the final judge of whether or not an utterance is acceptable in their dialect. Differences of dialect, of course, cause frequent disagreement among native speakers. Not all dialect differences are geographical; many are social and educational.
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Course Structure
Basic Conversation
Each lesson begins with a Basic Conversation covering a daily life
situation, organized around one or more grammatical points. The
conversation is presented first in build-up form, then in recapitulation.
The buildup is partly a device to isolate new words and phrases for
pronunciation and identification, partly a device to enable students to
gain smooth delivery and natural sentence rhythm by starting with a small
segment of a sentence then progressively adding to it to build a full
sentence.
The recommended procedure for the buildup is as follows: Language learners open their books to the new lesson and look at the English equivalents as the recording voices the Cantonese. The recording voices the first item six times - three times for the learners to listen only, three times for them to repeat after the recording.Then move on to the next item and repeat the same procedure.
In the recapitulation section the conversation is repeated in full sentence form. The recording voices each sentence at least two times, with pauses after each sentence for students to repeat. The first goal is for the students to be able to say the conversation after the recording at natural speed and with natural sentence rhythm. Details of pronunciation are spotlighted in another section - the first goal for the conversation is sentence rhythm and natural speed.
The second goal is for the students to memorize the Basic Conversation, so they can say it independently, maintaining natural speed and rhythm. Students will find the recordings a valuable aid to memorizing; they are tireless in furnishing a model for students to imitate, and enable them to precede at the pace best suited to their needs.
The purpose of memorizing the Basic Conversations is twofold. Memorizing situational material gives students tip-of-the-tongue command of useable Cantonese. Secondly, since the basic conversations are organized on grammatical principles, by memorizing the conversations they will be learning the grammatical framework of the language, on which they can construct other sentences.
Pronunciation Practice
In general, the Pronunciation Practices concentrate on giving limited
explanation and fuller practice drills on new sounds encountered in a
lesson, plus comparison drills with sounds previously learned and
sometimes comparisons with American close counterparts. Instead of giving
many examples, using items unknown to the students the pronunciation
drills stick to examples from material they have met in the Basic
Conversation or Pattern Drills. The exception to this is Lesson One, which
presents an overview of all the tones, consonant initials, and vocalic
finals of the language, in addition to giving an introduction to
intonation and stress. Students who absorb pronunciation best through
mimicking the model and who find the linguistic description of sounds
confusing or boring or both, should concentrate on mimicking the model and
skimp or skip the explanations.
Notes
There are two kinds of Notes - Structure Notes and Culture
Notes.
The Structure Notes summarize the structures used in the Basic Conversations and practiced in the Pattern Drills, and are for those students who want a general explanation of how the language works. The students who absorb language structures better through learning model sentences and drilling variations of the model can concentrate on the Basic Conversations and Pattern Drills, and skimp on the Structure Notes.
The Culture Notes comment on some Cantonese life patterns which differ from our own.
Pattern Drills
There are six kinds of Pattern Drills in Cantonese Basic Course. The
purpose of the drills is to make the vocabulary and sentence structures
sink in and become speech habits, so that the student understands spoken
Cantonese without having to translate mentally and speaks fluently and
grammatically at natural speed without awkward hesitation and groping for
words.
The Pattern Drills give students practice in structures and words which have been introduced in the Basic Conversations. In addition, there are other vocabulary items which appear first in the drill sections. A plus (+) sign marks each occurrence of a new word in this section, and the English equivalent is given.
Each drill begins with an recorded example giving a model of the cue and the student's response. Then there follow 8 to 10 problems to be done on this pattern. The recording gives the cue, and the student responds to the new cue following the pattern set in the example. The response is thus predictable, controlled by the pattern and the cue. In the book the cues are given in the left hand column and the responses on the right, with the example above. A drill is mastered when the student can respond to the cues promptly, smoothly, and without reference to the book.
These types of drills follow:
1. Substitution Drills
The recording gives a pattern sentence, and then a word or phrase (called a cue) to be substituted in the original sentence. The student notes the substitution cue and substitutes it in the appropriate place to make a new sentence.
R: (for Recording) Good morning, Mrs. Brown. /Jones/ S: (for Student) Hat. . 2. Expansion Drills
There are two kinds of expansion drills. One could be called a listen-and-add drill, using vocabulary and structures familiar to the students. The recording gives a word or phrase and the students repeat it. Then the recording gives another word or phrase and the students add that word to the original utterance, expanding it. Then another cue is added, and the students incorporate it, and so on, making each time a progressively longer utterance.
R: Hat. S: Hat. R: Blue. S: Blue hat. R: Two. S: Two blue hats. R: Buy. S: Buy two blue hats. This type of expansion drill is handled a little differently if it includes new vocabulary. In that case it is performed as a listen-and-repeat drill, the students echoing the recording:
R: Hat. S: Hat. R: Blue hat. S: Blue hat. R: Two blue hats. S: Two blue hats. In the second type of expansion drill the example sentence gives the model to follow and the students expand the subsequent cue sentences according to the pattern set by the example:
R: I'm not Mrs. Lee. /Chan/ S: I'm not Mrs. Lee - my name is Chan. 3. Response Drills
The response drills involve 1) question stimulus and answer response, or 2) statement stimulus and statement response, or 3) statement stimulus and question response:
Ex 1:
R: Is your name Chan? /Lee/S: No, it's Lee.
Ex 2:
R: He speaks Cantonese. /Mandarin/S: He speaks Mandarin too.
Ex 3:
R: He speak Cantonese. /Mandarin/S: Does he speak Mandarin too? 4. Transformation Drills
In transformation drills the students transform the grammatical form of the cue sentences from positive to negative to question, according to the pattern set in the example. A positive to negative transformation would be:
R: Her name is Lee. S: Her name isn't Lee. 5. Combining Drills
In combining drills the students make one long sentence from two short cue sentences, according to the pattern set in the example.
R: It's nine o'clock. We study Chinese. S: We study Chinese at nine o'clock. 6. Conversation Drills
In conversation drills students carry on a conversation following the pattern set by the example. The book or the recording furnishes cues to vary the content while retaining the structure.
A: Good morning, Mrs. Lee. B: Excuse me, I'm not Mrs. Lee. My name is Chan. A: Oh, excuse me, Miss Chan. B: That's all right. .... A: Good morning, Mrs. Smith. B: Excuse me, I'm not Mrs. Smith. My name is Brown. A: Oh, excuse me, Miss Brown. B: That's all right.
Conversations for Listening
The Conversations for Listening, recorded on tapes, give students a chance
to listen to further conversations using the vocabulary and sentence
patterns of the lesson under study. Usually several replays are needed
before the students' comprehension of the conversation is complete. After
they understand a conversation in its entirety it is recommended that they
play it through two or three more times, listening especially for the
expressive elements of intonation and final particles, as these occur
primarily in conversation and not as natural features of pattern j
sentences which the students practice in the drill sections.
After Lesson 10, there will be new vocabulary in the Conversations for Listening, to help the story along. These words and phrases are glossed in Cantonese and English at the foot of each conversation in the printed text, but students will not be held responsible for learning them.
Vocabulary Checklist
At the end of each lesson is a vocabulary checklist, giving the new
vocabulary for that lesson, the part of speech for each entry (noun, verb,
etc.), and the English translation.
System of Romanization Used
The system of romanization used in the text is a modification of the
Huang-Kok Yale romanization. It is described in detail in Lesson 1. In
comparing Cantonese and Mandarin sentence structures the system of
romanization used for the Mandarin is Yale romanization.
Cantonese Basic 1 - Cassette
14 Tapes - $209
Cantonese Basic 1 -
CD 14 CD's - $219
Cantonese Basic
2 - Cassette 15 Tapes - $259
Cantonese Basic
1 and 2 - Cassette 29 Tapes - $399