How to read and say Cantonese

Like other Chinese languages, Cantonese is written using Chinese characters but employs its own "unique" pronunciation for those characters.

The pronunciations given in this guidebook use the Yale Romanization system. Unlike in Mandarin, there is no widely-used Romanization system for Cantonese, and native speakers almost never learn those that do exist. Since most locals will have no idea how to read Romanized Cantonese, stick to Chinese characters for written communication.

Unless otherwise indicated, pronunciation between the Cantonese of Hong Kong and Macau is identical to that of Guangzhou.

Consonants

Like Mandarin, Cantonese distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, not unvoiced and voiced as in English, and lacks voiced consonants. Aspirated sounds are pronounced with a distinctive puff of air as they are pronounced in English when at the beginning of a word, while unaspirated sounds are pronounced without the puff, as in English when found in clusters. However, Cantonese lacks the "tongue rolling" (pinyin zh, ch, sh, r) initial consonants that are found in Mandarin.

Finals

Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese retains all the final consonants (m, n, ŋ, p, t, and k) of Middle Chinese. The final consonants p, t, and k are unreleased. This means that they are virtually silent and you hear no "puff of air" at the end of the syllable.

Tones

Cantonese is a tonal language. This means that the same syllable, pronounced in a different tone, has a different meaning. To complicate this, there may be more than one character pronounced as the same syllable with the same tone. In this case, context usually helps resolve the ambiguity. This may sound daunting, but is in fact is better than say, English, where there are a great deal of words that are spoken identically (eg. their, there, they're) and have nothing but context to help determine which one it is. Cantonese has context and tone to help distinguish words.

Different variations of the Cantonese language have a different number of tones, from as few as six to as many as ten or more. The larger numbers involve distinctions that modern linguists don't consider tonal, so to get by, you only need to distinguish between the following six tones:

The tonal pronunciation of Cantonese is by far the most difficult aspect of the often daunting language. The very minor initial difficulty in learning the tones is sometimes more than made up for by simple grammar, and absence of almost all plurals, genders, tenses and other conjugations that make many other world languages seem difficult by comparison.