How to Learn to Speak Cantonese by Listening to Songs
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Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese is considerably harder to learn to speak. Most get caught up by the intonation confusion. Here are a few ways to help.
[edit] Steps
- Listen to Cantonese songs, then sing along to it, even if you are tone-deaf. There are 9 different intonations (3 of them are variations) in Cantonese as oppsed to just 4 in Mandarin. But if you have a copy of a Cantonese song's lyrics, and you sing along to it, the intonation to the words fits almost perfectly to the muscial scale of seven (with some overlapping allowances). Which makes it very easy for Cantonese lyricists to fit words around catchy tunes.
- Once you get a few songs down, you'll work out the general pattern. Only then, you ask a native speaker to teach you a few simple phrases. For example, to say Bye Bye in Cantonese, imagine singing the first 'bye' in a 'so' as your do re mi's, then the seond in a 'fa'.
[edit] Tips
- The intonation number does not mean the note number in a musical scale. So if 'do' (C in C major scale) is note number one, it does not quite mean that intonation no. 1 is that 'do' note.
[edit] Warnings
- Like Mandarin, Cantonese is a tonal language. So if you miss the intonation by a bit, it can mean a different word altogether, giving you different meaning altogether, so get the intoniation right. But that also mean that people that speaks in Mandarin & Cantonese have problem reading sarcasm.










