The Cantonese Scrolls (粵卷) – A Cantonese Language Learning Mental RPG
16 comments
·February 3, 2025fredrikholm
Heartwarming to see learning material for Cantonese.
Does anyone have any good material for speaking? I've grown up watching Cantonese movies and have tones and pronunciation down ok, but I'm finding it hard to progress through private study with regards to reaching conversational levels of vocab/grammar.
jhsvsmyself
Hop on OpenAI voice mode and start speaking. I do this for Mandarin and Spanish, it even speaks my native Afrikaans! Valuable and only $20 a month. Also, it's great because it can speak about anything, which I find refreshing rather than having domain specific resources.
10594891
I'm confused, is there supposed to be some kind of game on the site that isn't loading for me?
There are references to things like "dungeons" and "encounters" and so on, but all that I see are a bunch of pages with lists of words/phrases in boxes.
littlekey
I was about to say the same thing, the whole thing is just confusing to me. There doesn't appear to be any game.
999900000999
Very neat!
I've only studied Mandarin though, are you aware of a similar game for that ?
fearedbliss
Not that I'm aware of. I believe I'm the first person to frame (and in a way "open source") a language program in this type of way. My perspective is a mixture of a lot of different things including my love for Diablo 1 (and its minimalism and simplicity) and 2 (Original, not Resurrected).
Svoka
This is amazing! Consider potentially adding support for WebSpeech api to make it easier. Something like
const voice = speechSynthesis.getVoices().filter(e => e.lang==='zh-HK').at(-1)
const utterance = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance('你好')
utterance.voice = voice
speechSynthesis.speak(utterance)null
chongli
I have been using Duolingo for a couple years to learn some Mandarin. Its resources are pretty good, if a bit dodgy here and there (some occasional weird pronunciations or translations).
I'm really excited about a Cantonese resource though. I have a few Cantonese-speaking friends and I would love to learn some myself!
ilamont
I've seen weird tones, but IMHO the biggest limitation of Duolingo Mandarin is the lack of a traditional character option.
peterburkimsher
Pingtype isn't a game, but you might find it interesting. It does the pinyin and word-by-word romanisation of whatever text you put in.
KerryJones
Came here to ask for the same thing.
ViktorRay
This is pretty cool! Well done!
ww520
This is excellent. Gamify learning. Nice way to learn.
johnzim
Awesome!
> - Characters starting with the vowel i sound more an e. Therefore, "to invite", 請 (cing2), sounds more like ceng2, and "to hear/listen", 聽 (ting1), sounds more like teng1.
As a Cantonese speaker, I love the effort here! However, the above isn't correct. This is an example of vernacular vs. literary pronunciation, and 請 has both pronunciations, depending on context. For instance, 請 is ceng2 when used as the verb "to invite", but cing2 in compounds like jiu1 cing2 邀請.
It shouldn't be conflated with the phenomenon later in that same paragraph about 懶音 "lazy pronunciation".