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Teach Yourself Cantonese Complete Course Audiopack | 
 enlarge | Authors: Hugh Baker, Pui-kei Ho
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.48
You Save: $10.47 (42%)
Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 323634
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0071418768
Dewey Decimal Number: 495
UPC: 639785413608
EAN: 9780071418768
ASIN: 0071418768
Publication Date: November 21, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW
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Product Description
Learning Cantonese as easy as 1-2-3 With this book, Cantonese is attainable for any beginning student. You can use Teach Yourself Cantonese Complete Course at your own pace or as a supplement to formal courses. This complete course is based on the very latest learning methods and designed to be enjoyable and user-friendly. Prepared by experts in the language, Teach Yourself Cantonese begins with the basics and gradually promotes you to a level of smooth and confident communication, including: - Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues
- Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and exercises
- Step-by-step guide to pronunciation
- Practical vocabulary
- Regular and irregular verb tables
- Plenty of practice exercises and answers
- Bilingual glossary
Package includes two 60-minute CDs and a book.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 well-balanced November 3, 2008
Richard Almasi (Europe)
Overall, this is an ideal book to learn Cantonese from.
However, that said, this book can be considered slightly outdated in some of its pronunciations; Cantonese is a very dynamic language and subject to frequent trends in pronunciation and usage.
(By frequent I am comparing to English).
People would still understand what you mean, depending on generation, so it's not a crucial problem.
The dialogues are written both in the romanized script and the traditional Chinese script used in Hong Kong and Taiwan (i.e. not the simplified Mandarin Chinese).
So you have the option to learn the script if you want to.
I should warn you however that if you decide to learn the script as well it will take you much longer to complete this book - if time is an issue for you.
The book is well balanced in my opinion, it doesn't push the reader to do more than she/he can handle:
+ there are just enough vocabulary in each chapter
+ grammar is explained well
+ the exercises are effective
My only complaint is that I would have preferred more exercises.
I also recommend this book Basic Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook (Routledge Grammars) if you are a beginner, it will make your understanding of grammar very solid, it also follows more modern pronunciation.
Good tutorial, but not for absolute beginners October 19, 2008
JC (USA)
This is not for absolute beginners.
I suggest to tackle Pimsluer Cantonese (I) first. Go over it at least twice. THEN, try this one out.
While Pimsluer can be studied while driving your car, this 'Teach yourself Cantonese' will have to be studied sitting at your desk with the textbook. With Pimsluer, you learn the very basics like a baby learns his mother tongue. However, after that stage, you do need some structured approach. That is where this book comes in. Some grammer here, some rules there; before you know it you are learning a lot. The appendix of the textbook also serves as a dictionary-albeit very limited and crude.
It is a little difficult transition from the Pimsleur, but sooner or later one needs to do it. I guess repeat repeat repeat until knowing by heart. CD certainly helps to clarify the pronounciation, as the original speakers provide examples. Unfortunately, the CD is very limited and does not cover the whole dialog for later chapters.
Here are couple reasons I can't give 5 stars:
1. The main dialog has no English translation. You can make intelligent guesses on the meaning, since they have English translation for 'new vocabulary', but occasionally that is not enough.
2. CD is quite limited, some later chapters omits some dialogs.
3. Perhaps a little too big leap for relatively new comers to Cantonese. A lot of material is jam-packed. Unless you are seriously dedicated, you won't be able to digest this book !!! Just for comparison, the verb ending '-jo' first appears on page 28 here, but on "Colloquial Cantonese" (by K. Tong and G. James, Routledge publisher), it first appears on page 82. I am not necessarily endorsing "C.C.", but the pace is quit different. ("C.C" has its weakness too)
Nice book May 27, 2008
discotae (San Diego, CA)
I've always wanted to learn conversational Cantonese and this book is a nice book for it. The audio cd's are nice too. I wish the cd's would go over more of the pronunciations listed in the book. But for this price, I really can't complain.
Among the best books for learning cantonese March 24, 2008
Proffy (Brooklyn, NY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Other reviewers have already pointed out that this is among the best books for learning Cantonese, so here just a few additional comments:
- this book is quite dense. There is a lot of material in those 26 chapters. This means you get a lot of value, but also that it can seem frustrating to be stuck somewhere in the middle of the book. The audio material is also good, but a little more limited.
- in general, if you are serious about learning Cantonese, consider taking at least a few lessons with someone at the very beginning, then continue on your own. Otherwise it will be very hard. Also, if you can afford it, buy a combo of materials, maybe this book plus the Basic Cantonese grammar of Matthews and Yip, plus a small dictionary ("Pocket Cantonese Dictionary" from Periplus or "Phrases in Cantonese" from Hung).
- this book comes in different versions, with CD or audio cassette. Make sure to get the CD so you can easily move the material to your mp3 player or computer for flexible playback. Amazon is not always clear on which version you are dealing with, so I first got the one with tapes.
- also, there are older versions of the Baker/Ho books that do not use Yale romanization but their own system. Stay away from those or anyone who has their own system. Stick with Yale or maybe Jyutping.
- if there is something missing in this book, it would be a more complete coverage of the grammar. Also get the Matthews/Yip book for this! And the list of vocabulary at the end is missing the chinese characters - even if you don't learn characters, it is still useful to have them written out to disambiguate certain cases.
- this book distinguishes between high and high falling tone, and thus has one more tone than some other books. I am not convinced this actually makes a difference or is needed to be understood.
good for the price January 4, 2008
JD
Not overally comprehensive but given the limited amount of resources available for the language, is relatively simple to use to get a basic understanding. I wish the CD's would cover the complete vocabulary list for all of the lessons instead of only the dialogues. But at this low price, the course is hard to beat.
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