How I Learn Cantonese

I use the ideas, methods, and tools outlined on:

Khatzumoto’s website: All Japanese All The Time
Steve Kaufmann’s website: The Linguist

To summarize the above methods: A lot of listening to comprehensible input over and over. Comprehensible input means media that is suitable to your level. So you start with the Teach Yourself Cantonese book first, and then quickly move over into media for native speakers. With each subsequent listen, try to notice things in the language that you didn’t notice the first time around, and most importantly, have fun while doing it.

I use a bunch of books and study materials but started with:

Teach Yourself Cantonese by Hugh Baker
Remembering Traditional Hanzi 1: How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters
Remembering Traditional Hanzi 2: How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters
A Practical Cantonese-English Dictionary by Sidney Lau This is difficult to find online. I had to go to Swindon Book Co. at 13-15 Lock Road Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon in Hong Kong to find it. You could probably just use CantoDict

Both these books are fun to have:

There are a lot of good and useful expressions in those books that I hear often in conversations.

I have other books and dictionaries, but those are the ones that I use most often.

I also use:

Anki for flashcards
Learning with Text for reading
Wenlin (文林) for looking up words and stroke order
Canto Fish for reading websites
New Tong Wen Tang (新同文堂) for converting the Chinese Communist Party’s Chinese Characters back into real Chinese
CantoInput for writing Cantonese characters like “嗰系喺佢哋嘅” using the Yale IME (also supports Jyutping) because I’m a bit of a purist and dislike seeing sentences like “我D朋友”or “距”being used in place of “佢.”