Pimsleur Conversational Cantonese Chinese - 8 Audio CDs
8 CD's - Brand New
Includes a free CD case
This Basic program contains 5 hours of audio-only, effective language learning with real-life spoken practice sessions.
HEAR IT, LEARN IT, SPEAK IT
The pimsleur dialect education system is a language studing scheme designed by Dr P Pimsleur. The scheme is founded on 4 main issues : anticipation, graduated time recollection, underlying vocabulary, plus natural remembering. Pimsleur technique is an audiobook procedure, in which the student constructs phrases or repeats from memory along with a recording. Foreign language courses frequently want a student to replicate after an lecturer, which Pimsleur stated was a passive tactic of studing. Dr paul pimsleur developed a "challenge and reply" procedure, where a learner was prompted to transform a saying into the objective language, which was then set. This procedure creates a more active way of studing, requiring the student to cogitate before replying. Pimsleur believed the principle of anticipation mirrored real speech in which a speaker must recall a saying quickly.
Graduated interlude memory is a method of reviewing learned vocabulary at increasing longer intervals. It is a adaptation of retention through spaced repetition. For instance, if a student learns the word deux French for two, then deux is tested every few seconds in the beginning, then every few minutes, then every few hours, and then every few days. The purpose of this spaced recall is to help out the learner change vocabulary into long-term memory. The program uses an audio format because Pimsleur argued that the preponderance of students sought after first and foremost to be trained to speak and comprehend. This auditory skill, learned through their ears and mouths, is a especially different skill to the visual one of reading and writing. Pimsleur argued that these two independent skills - audition and vision - should not be confused. He referred to his auditory system as "organic learning," which entails studying grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation simultaneously.
About Cantonese Chinese
Standard Cantonese is a variant of Cantonese (Yue) Chinese . It is spoken natively in and around the cities of Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau in Southern China. It is also spoken by many overseas Chinese of Guangdong, Hong Kong or Macau origin in Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, United States, Australia, Europe and elsewhere. Standard Cantonese is the de facto official Chinese spoken language of Hong Kong and Macau, and a lingua franca of Guangdong province and some neighbouring areas. Historically, Cantonese was the most common form of Chinese spoken by overseas Chinese communities in the Western world, although that situation has changed with the increasing importance of Mandarin in the Chinese-speaking world as well as immigration to the West from other countries as well as other parts of China.
Cantonese is usually referred to as a spoken dialect, and not as a written dialect. Spoken vernacular Cantonese differs from modern written Chinese, which is essentially formal Standard Mandarin in written form. Written Chinese spoken word for word sounds overly formal and distant in Cantonese. As a result, the necessity of having a written script which matched the spoken form increased over time. This resulted in the creation of additional Chinese characters to complement the existing characters. Many of these represent phonological sounds not present in Mandarin. A good source for well documented Cantonese words can be found in drama and opera (daai hei) scripts. Written Cantonese is largely incomprehensible to non-Cantonese speakers because written Cantonese is based on spoken Cantonese which is different from Standard Mandarin in grammar and vocabulary.
With the advent of the computer and standardization of character sets specifically for Cantonese, many printed materials in predominantly Cantonese speaking areas of the world are written to cater to their population with these written Cantonese characters. As a result, mainstream media such as newspapers and magazines have become progressively less conservative and more colloquial in their dissemination of ideas. Generally speaking, some of the older generation of Cantonese speakers regard this trend as a step "backwards" and away from tradition. This tension between the "old" and "new" is a reflection of a transition that is being undergone by the Cantonese speaking population.
"Readings in Cantonese colloquial: being selections from books in the Cantonese vernacular with free and literal translations of the Chinese character and romanized spelling" (1894) by James Dyer Ball has a bibliography of works available in Cantonese characters in the last decade of the nineteenth century. A few libraries have collections of so-called "wooden fish books" written in Cantonese character. Facsimiles and plot precis of a few of these have been published in Wolfram Eberhard's "Cantonese Ballads." See also "Cantonese love-songs, translated with introduction and notes by Cecil Clementi" (1904) or a newer translation of these Yue Ou in "Cantonese love songs : an English translation of Jiu Ji-yung's Cantonese songs of the early 19th century" (1992). Cantonese character versions of the Bible, Pilgrims Progress, and Peep of Day as well as simple catechisms were published by mission presses. The special Cantonese characters used in all these was not standardized and shows wide variation. |
