Pimsleur Chinese (Cantonese) Conversational Course - Level 1 Lessons 1-16 CD: Learn to Speak and Understand Cantonese Chinese with Pimsleur Language Programs
Pimsleur® equals success. Just one 30-minute lesson a day gets you speaking and understanding like no other program.
This course includes Lessons 1-16 from the Chinese (Cantonese) Level 1 Program - 8 hours of audio-only effective language learning with real-life spoken practice sessions. Each lesson provides 30 minutes of spoken language practice, with an introductory conversation, and new vocabulary and structures. Detailed instructions enable you to understand and participate in the conversation. Practice for vocabulary introduced in previous lessons is included in each lesson. Topics include: greetings, numbers, meals, shopping, telling time, scheduling activities, and asking and giving directions. The emphasis is on pronunciation and comprehension, and on learning to speak Cantonese.
The Cantonese Chinese Language Cantonese, one of several major languages in China, is mainly spoken in Hong Kong, Guangdong, the Guangxi provinces, and in most overseas Chinese communities in Australia, Europe, and North America. Pimsleur's Chinese Cantonese teaches Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong.
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Borrowed for free from my library. As someone who grew up speaking/listening but lost it as an adult, I found this actually pretty helpful to practice speaking. Granted this is more to get in the practice of forming sentences and getting tones down. It forces you to learn only through audio learning and discourages any writing or note taking, which was surprisingly more effective than what I’ve tried before. There’s not much vocabulary in terms of quantity but it’s a good place to start. Also yes a lot of the phrases as you get further in the lessons seem to mostly be pick up lines but hey, it’s still practice.
How to pick Cantonese chicks. Pointing out Western language speakers have no chance of learning anything more than basic phrases in a tonal language using any recorded language course constitutes no particular criticism of this particular course - they are all somewhat equally useless. If you pick up "good morning" or "restaurant", you have progressed as well as most. A particular criticism of this course revolves around the, somewhat uncomfortable, assumptions behind some of the phrases it focuses on. In particular, a lot of the conversation phrases the book presents seemingly involve picking up women. To be fair, many of the phases ("do you want to eat something?", "do you want to drink something?", "do you want to go to the restaurant?","what time can you go to the restaurant?", etc.) also have a perfectly innocent interpretation. When these phrases appear along certain others ("do you want to go to the hotel?", "do you want to go to my place?",,etc.) a pattern starts to appear. Sadly, most of the phases you learn in response seem to assume that the compilers of the phrase book think you have no game ("I do not want to go to your place","I do not want to go to the hotel","7 o'clock - impossible!, 8 o'clock - impossible!, 9 o'clock - impossible!"). At about unit 5, one begins to wonder when other useful related phrases will appear in the book ("your hair is nice", "I like your dress", "I drive a BMW",etc.). In short, buy computer-assisted learning software or get your company to pick up the tab for a real tutor or be prepared for some lonely Hong Kong nights.
It's like my aunt yelling at me... "Do you speak Cantonese?" <pause> "Do you speak Cantonese?" <pause> "Why didn't your mother teach you Cantonese?" <pause>
Some of the conversations are strangely oriented around picking up women in Hong Kong. It's not quite "How to be a creepy gaijin - Hong Kong edition" but most of my Cantonese speaking is with elderly people, so it's a bit off-putting.