About
Growing up in the UK, I didn’t appreciate everything my parents did to teach us to speak Cantonese. I definitely would have preferred not to go to Chinese School every Sunday.
After I had my daughter, I realised that I wanted to teach her about her culture and encourage her to learn Cantonese. Spoken Cantonese is challenging for non-natives because it differs from written Chinese, and I struggled to find resources to engage my daughter.
It’s even more challenging if only one parent speaks Cantonese, or if you are not a native speaker. As children get older and are immersed in English at nursery or school, it becomes easier for both you and your child to default to speaking English. There is also a tendency for even native speakers to code-switch, mixing up languages. This is something I continue to struggle with.
To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world
(Proverb)
My first spoken Cantonese book was about animals because my daughter, like most children, loved animals from a young age. Positive feedback spurred on me and added more books to the series. I also wrote a book with parenting phrases (Daily Conversation) and picture books, some of which I illustrated myself.
This website was started to provide free resources for learning spoken Cantonese. It is a part-time project funded by book sales (after a proportion of profits from book sales has been donated to charity), so please let me know if there are any resources you would like to see.
Thank you to everyone who has bought a book or supported me in any way through my journey, especially readers who have reached out with encouragement, advice or corrections. To all the parents doing their best to keep this beautiful language alive, 加油 (gaa1 jau2) – add oil!
xx Farina
These are some of the charities to which donations have been made:
AAPI Community Fund
Bowel Cancer UK
Cancer Research
Make-A-Wish Foundation
Prostate Cancer
Rainbow Trust
World Land Trust
Worldwide Fund For Nature (WWF)