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Modern Cantonese Book 1: A textbook for global learners PDF

133 Pages·2022·10.393 MB·English
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MODERN CANTONESE BOOK 1 The first volume of Modern Cantonese aims to provide solid linguistic training to beginner Cantonese learners, highlighting cultural points with lively language scenarios. This book provides daily conversational scenarios, such as introducing yourself and others, ordering food, going out with friends, shopping, planning a weekend, and talking about hobbies and leisure activities, as well as holidays and festivals. The scenarios cover daily settings with essential learning points, and on completion of the course, learners will be able to understand questions and statements in Cantonese conversations and will be able to discuss familiar everyday topics using simple sentences in Cantonese. The book is ideal for students seeking to learn Cantonese as a second language at the novice level, based on ACTFL speaking proficiency guidelines. It may also be of interest to language teachers and linguists in the field of Cantonese as a second language. Siu-lun Lee is Senior Lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has over 25 years of experience teaching Cantonese at the tertiary level. His research interests include applied linguistics, Cantonese studies, Chinese linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language teaching pedagogy. MODERN CANTONESE BOOK 1 A textbook for global learners Siu-lun Lee Designed cover image: Siu-lun Lee First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Siu-lun Lee The right of Siu-lun Lee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-53910-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-53909-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08368-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003083689 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/9780367539092 CONTENTS A note on the volumes vi Preface vii Introduction viii How to use this book xv Meet the characters in this book xvii 1 What is your name? – Néih giu mātyéh méng a? 1 2 What do you like doing? – Néih jūngyi jouh mātyéh a? 9 3 Where can we go to see an art exhibition? – Ngóhdeih hóyíh hái bīn douh tái wájín a? 18 4 What is the date today? – Gāmyaht haih géi yuht géi houh a? 27 5 What time are we going to see a movie? – Ngóhdeih géi dím heui tái hei a? 37 6 How much is this phone? – Nī go dihnwá géi dō chín a? 48 7 What presents do you give to your friends? – Néih sung mātyéh béi pàhngyáuh a? 57 8 What is your phone number? – Néih ge dihnwá houhmáh haih géi dō houh a? 66 9 What kind of dim sum do you like to eat? – Néih séung sihk mātyéh dímsām a? 75 10 What do you do at Chinese New Year? – Jūngwok Sānnìhn néih jouh mātyéh a? 85 Appendix 1 Glossary of linguistic terms 95 Appendix 2 English translation of questions 97 Appendix 3 List of learning points 102 Appendix 4 List of relevant phrases 104 v A NOTE ON THE VOLUMES This book series is designed for learners of Cantonese as a second language. The book series is targeted at learners who are English speakers or who use English as an additional language. It is designed for learners from novice to intermediate level, and for institutions or schools providing structured courses in the modern Cantonese language, as spoken in Hong Kong. These books can be used for teaching Cantonese in colleges and universities, as well as other schools and institutions in the Asian region and elsewhere in the world. The examples of language use in the book series are drawn from authentic data, including an 800,000-word corpus collected from L1 (first-language) Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. In all, the series contains around 2000 relevant phrases, 150 constructions and structures used in thirty language sce- narios. All the lessons in the series are systematically structured according to increas- ing levels of difficulty, and the book series uses the Yale romanization system to demonstrate and teach Cantonese pronunciation. vi PREFACE The majority of the Cantonese textbooks previously published have typically been designed for learners at the beginner or upper-beginner level. Many stu- dents want to continue their studies beyond this level but lack the appropriate materials or textbooks to do so. In the past, a number of noteworthy textbooks have been published. These include the First Year Cantonese series by Thomas O’Melia published in 1954 (Part I) and 1959 (Part II and Part III); the book series by Sidney Lau in 1972 (Elementary Cantonese and Intermediate Canton- ese) and 1975 (Advanced Cantonese); and the Speak Cantonese series by Parker Po-fei Huang and Gerard P. Kok published in 1973 (Book 1 and Book 2) and 1975 (Book 3). In their time, these series provided systematic guidance to learners of Cantonese, although they appear somewhat dated by today’s standards. This new Modern Cantonese textbook series sets out to provide a modern and up-to-date approach to the learning and teaching of Cantonese as a second language. It is intended that the series will be used by universities, colleges, and schools in Hong Kong, as well as by other institutions around the world. Students looking for self-study materials will also find this series useful, as it focuses on authentic spoken Cantonese as used in contemporary Hong Kong and sets out to provide an authentic and contextualized approach to the learning of the language. Book 1 in the series is targeted at beginning learners of Cantonese. This book provides daily conversational scenarios, such as introducing yourself and others, ordering food, going out with friends, shopping, planning a weekend, and talking about hobbies and leisure activities, as well as holidays and festivals. The scenarios, which cover daily settings with essential learning points, aim at providing solid lin- guistic training to learners, and on completion of the course, learners will be able to understand questions and statements in Cantonese conversations, and will be able to discuss familiar everyday topics using simple sentences in Cantonese. vii INTRODUCTION The term ‘Cantonese’ refers to the language varieties used by immigrants who came to Hong Kong from various districts in Guangdong province, including Macau, Panyu, Taishan, Xinhui, and Zhongshan. Over time, their speech coalesced into the contemporary variety of Cantonese used in Hong Kong from the late nineteenth cen- tury onwards. Cantonese is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, which includes varieties of Cantonese spoken in southern China, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, and among overseas Chinese in North America, Europe, and Australia. It is currently estimated that there are about 70 million Cantonese speak- ers in the world. Cantonese has been and is still the major language variety used by people in daily life in Hong Kong (Bacon-Shone, Bolton, & Luke, 2015; Bolton, Bacon-Shone, & Lee, 2020; Bolton & Lee, 2020). Currently, the language policy of the Hong Kong government promotes ‘trilingualism and biliteracy’. Trilingualism refers to the three major spoken languages used in Hong Kong, that is, Cantonese, Putonghua, and English, while biliteracy refers to the use of two written languages, written Chinese and written English. According to the census results, around 90 per- cent of Hong Kong’s population use Cantonese as their usual spoken language (Hong Kong SAR Government, 2011, 2016). Cantonese grammar This book series uses a practical approach to grammar and focuses on describing how words are used and sentences formed. A glossary of linguistic terms used in the book may be found in Appendix 1. Grammatical constructions The notion of ‘grammatical construction’ refers to words and phrases that form the constituents of sentences. Grammatical constructions are presented in the ‘Learning points’ and ‘Relevant phrases’ sections. For example, in English, the grammatical construction, ‘the easier, the better’, is not just a fixed phrase, but a general pattern (‘the – er, the better’) with slots that can be filled by almost any comparative phrase. vviiiiii In this book series, grammatical constructions are the fundamental building blocks ix of sentences, paragraphs, and discourse, which are useful patterns for learners to Introduction acquire, to experiment with, and to use creatively. Spoken Cantonese, written Cantonese, and written Chinese The relationship between spoken Cantonese, written Cantonese, and written Chi- nese is complex. When the educational authorities of the People’s Republic of China started to promote spoken Putonghua and simplified characters on the mainland after 1949, Hong Kong retained the use of ‘standard written Chinese’ in full characters in most schools in the region. Accordingly, until recently, most children were taught to read ‘standard written Chinese’ aloud with spoken Cantonese pronunciation. In addition to standard written Chinese, there is a distinct variety of ‘written Canton- ese’ that is popular in informal written communication, commercial advertisements, television subtitles, and comic books (Snow, 2004; Bauer, 2018). The use of ‘written Cantonese’ is stigmatized in schools and in official settings, and in Hong Kong there is a ‘diglossic’ situation in operation, where ‘written Cantonese’ and informal spoken Cantonese are both regarded as ‘L’ forms, and ‘standard written Chinese’ and its cor- responding spoken forms are regarded as the ‘H’ forms and are used in educational and other formal settings. For example, mātyéh 乜嘢 (a question word meaning ‘what’) is the spoken form in Cantonese, while the form sahmmō 甚麼 is used in standard written Chinese. This book series does not include Chinese characters, but uses Yale romanization to represent spoken Cantonese. The Yale system and Cantonese pronunciation A syllable in Cantonese is composed of three elements: (1) an initial formed by a consonant or consonant cluster at the beginning of a syllable, (2) a final formed by a vowel or vowel glide in open syllables and a vowel or vowel glide with a consonant in closed syllable, (3) a tone, which is the pitch contour of a syllable, including ā (high-level tone), á (high-rising tone), a (mid-level tone), àh (low-falling tone), áh (low-rising tone), ah (low-level tone). Cantonese is a tonal language, in which tones play a very important role in identifying the meaning of words. This book series uses the Yale romanization system to mark the initials, finals, and tones for teaching purposes. Cantonese initials According to their phonological features, the nineteen initials (sīngmóuh 聲母) are viii divided into five groups, as shown in Table 1. ix

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