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Re: a beginner wondering...

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cactusa
I checked Assimil out but it's way too expensive and I am not sure my French is up to the level required, haven't been using it for...12 years? I am taking a look at the other 3 you mentioned and they all use Yale, so I guess a good start would be checking out tones and how the yale system works.

Yale and Jyutping are very similar and if you know one it's quick work to learn the other. I've never used much material with Yale, but I can read it, albeit not as fast as I read Jyutping. Also, there's a grammar book out there (the only one published for Cantonese, AFAIK), by Virginia Yip and someone else. It's called Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. It's pretty good, and it uses Yale.

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I have seen the current shared decks on Anki. I wouldn't know about the actual Cantonese contents, but as far as layout goes, they are mostly horrible. There's a deck made by a member here, I forgot the name, it seemed good but if I'm correct it relies on TTS.. Most of my material would come from radio, movies or textbooks so the idea of TTS..I don't know, really.

Once you've learned the romanization, there's really no need for TTS or other "audio lookup". The romanization contains all the information you need, except for sentence rhythm, which you should get from movies and the like, anyway. For single morpheme lookup, TTS is fine, though. You won't get any mispronunciation, since the system is completely phonetic. I'd never use TTS in a language like English, but for Cantonese, it's likely not terrible. (Just don't use it for character pronunciation lookup, since many characters have multiple readings. But for romanization lookup it's fine.)

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So my guess is I will (once again) do my own deck. I know Subs2SRS and I am sure it is a great tool but I use a mac so tough luck for me.

Ha, I only know of it by rumor, since I'm a Mac boy, too.

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BUT! What if I actually skip the written part altogether? This may be heresy for you guys, but I have no interest in doing the whole RTK-like ordeal again. It's just not fun. So basically only learning spoken language through romanization. I remember seen this canadian kid speaking cantonese on youtube yesterday saying he basically focused only on speaking, and if I can speak and understand what some of my favourite movies are saying, it's well enough for me.
Sounds feasible? Or bs?

Sure, why not. Like I said, I'd recommend postponing character studies until a year or so into your studies, anyway. Skipping characters is totally fine, though you will have a hard time learning advanced vocabulary. But that should only be a problem if you're aiming for something like a C1 level, and by that time you'll have invested enough time and know the language well enough that such a decision would be much easier to make.

That said, using characters could give you a bit of a head start since you'll have a much easier time spotting Japanese and Korean loanwords. Cantonese has tons of Japanese loanwords, and Japanese and Korean both have tons of Chinese loanwords, so using characters could make it easier to connect the dots, so to speak. Once you know the Cantonese readings of most Japanese characters, you'll get loads of words for free. So it might actually be worthwhile to learn the Cantonese readings of the characters you already know from Japanese, I dunno.

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