Free Cantonese Materials

There’s plenty of books out there with accompanying CDs, as well as various websites where you can partner with a native speaker. Not as many books or sites as there are for Mandarin, of course, but that’s just the way it is, I’m afraid. I’ve got a little list of some of the free materals and websites out there (aside from the blogs linked to the right!) which you should take a look at if you’re starting out on Cantonese :

• Foreign Service Institute : Copies of this appear on EBay. You can spot them a mile off; they tend to list the audio in mp3 format and two books as pdfs. You do not need to buy these – the FSI courses are public domain and, as such, are completely free to download.  I repeat – DO NOT buy these. Instead download the books and accompanying audio from here. For free. These are genuinely a completely free course – yes, they can be a little dull and, yes, they are a little old. But they cost you nothing and you really ought to take a look at them.
• Cantofish : this little plugin is a life saver! I must admit I started learning spoken Cantonese to begin with just so my head wouldn’t hurt too much and left reading and writing until later down the line. At some point, though, you’re going to have to take the plunge and this is where this little beauty comes in. It’s a Firefox plugin that enables you to hover over a Chinese word to see the translation and pronunciation. You can install it from here.
• Adam’s site : I’ve linked to this over in the Cantonese Blogs section, but it isn’t really a blog. It’s probably the best Cantonese resource available on the web – the home of the Cantonese forums and the utterly invaluable CantoDict. This really ought to be your first stop on the internet if you’re serious about Cantonese. Get to it here.
• SharedTalk : brought to you by Rosetta Stone (and it’s such a shame they don’t have a Cantonese version of their software) this is a website that lets you connect with other people for the purposes of language sharing. So you’re a native English speaker and want to learn Cantonese? Create your profile on the site and look for people who want to learn English and speak Cantonese in return – the website lets you connect to one another either via text/email or an online voice session. Obviously, it requires a microphone, speakers etc. Create your profile here.