Phonetic Cantonese classics?
September 23, 2024 8:15 PM   Subscribe

I'm looking to brush up on my Cantonese and am looking for books that have Chinese characters (classical or traditional) along with some kind of phonetic romanization system, like Yale or Jyutping. I feel like there should be some kind of children's version of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms with a pronunciation guide but I haven't been able to find it.

My searches on abebooks or bookshop have mostly turned up things that are either fully in english or are inconclusive (like this one). I seem to only find versions entirely in English or Chinese, so I'm betting I need to add a new search term or look somewhere else.
posted by crossswords to Education (5 answers total)
 
Best answer: add a new search term

The term I know is "parallel text".

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much that isn't Mandarin, kids' books, or The Gospel of Matthew (at least on a very shallow search). If you don't find more, maybe consider audiobooks in conjunction with their text versions, or Cantonese movies/tv with Cantonese subtitles (Subtitles can usually be downloaded too, or extracted from video, for extra practice.)
posted by trig at 12:22 AM on September 24, 2024


Hmm, I found this (the Three Character Classic), though it's probably not as gripping as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms...

It's apparently taken from a book published with triple-dialect romanization by the "Chung Hwa Institution", which might? be this. Maybe searching for books from that publisher could get you somewhere.
posted by trig at 12:59 AM on September 24, 2024


Best answer: I spent a long time looking for a bilingual English/Cantonese (jyutping) picture book for a gift earlier this year, and it was more difficult than I expected. I say this because I'm not sure what you're looking for actually exists. (There are picture books available online, independently published, that have Cantonese/English parallel text, but they aren't the classics you seem to be looking for. )

There is, however, a Cantonese translation of The Little Prince with jyutping.
posted by invokeuse at 6:42 AM on September 24, 2024


How you considered calling or emailing the public library in Hong Kong and asking their reference desk for help?
posted by smilefreely at 11:20 AM on September 24, 2024


Are you only looking for physical books?

If not, it isn't exactly what you're searching for, but you could try Pleco. It's sold as a dictionary app but there are a number of add-ons available including graded readers. I use it for Mandarin but looking at the settings it should be possible to change the default dictionary from Mandarin to Cantonese.

The graded readers range from vocabularies of 150 to about 2500 characters. They don't have parallel text (unless there's a setting I haven't found) but you can tap a character to see the dictionary entry or copy and paste the text into a Jyutping converter (like this one).

All add-ons are a one-off purchase, there are no subscriptions.
posted by aussie_powerlifter at 2:55 AM on September 25, 2024


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