About

Thanks for dropping by!  It’s hard work encouraging your child to be bilingual, particularly if you live in a country where Cantonese isn’t one of the main spoken languages (which is most countries!).  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.  This is something I continue to struggle with.  With Cantonese, there is also the added complexity of the marked difference between spoken vs. written language, and a natural tendency for speakers to code-switch, mixing up both languages.

To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world

(Proverb)

I was teaching my daughter about animals in Cantonese but couldn’t find any resources with bright, vivid pictures in colloquial Cantonese. I started compiling a list of animals which eventually became a book. I wrote it in traditional Chinese colour-coded to Jyutping pronunciations and English translations.  I got a lot of positive feedback that this was helpful, so have added more books to the series.

This website was started as a way of providing free resources for learning spoken Cantonese.  This is very much a part-time project that is funded by book sales (after a proportion of profits from book sales have been donated to charity), so please let me know if there are any resources you would like to see.

To all the parents out there who are doing their best to expose their kids to Cantonese, 加油 (gaa1 jau2) i.e. add oil!

Charities donated to:

AAPI Community Fund
Cancer Research
Make-A-Wish Foundation
Prostate Cancer
Rainbow Trust
World Land Trust