Learn Chinese Cantonese Flashcards

Cons 1 Teaches written cantonese not spoken cantonese 2 Errors in Yale romanization No tones given 3 Poor UI control over what to study compared to other spaced repetition apps like StickyStudy for Mandarin Very limited and awkward unless you use it their prescribed way 4 Spacing of words is set in days instead of hours or minutes so hard to remember words 5 App has the ability to report errors against a flashcard I submitted several of these errors these go into a blackhole Pros 1 Good pronunciation 2 No other Cantonese flashcard apps with spaced repetition currently     Mixed Feelings

The authors of this app seem to have cobbled together their word list from written chinese sources without actually knowing anything about Cantonese Cantonese as spoken today is rarely written Cantonese speakers read in traditional Chinese Mandarin but do not speak the way they write The word usage and grammar differences are important between written Chinese and spoken Cantonese As an example the app uses siu si for hour which is what you see written on the subway signs advertisements etc in Hong Kong but nobody says siu si people say zung tau That odious error was in the first list of five words They dont say kau for ball they say bo While most native speakers would certainly understand siu si or kau it would sound weird and awkward much like the incorrect use of obscure english words There are written forms for all of the spoken words in Cantonese theyre just very rarely used for publication This means you can and should use them in an app like this While there may be worthwhile tech underlying the system here I find that I cannot trust the selection of vocabulary they present It is already sufficiently difficult to find good learning resources for Cantonese without someone else tossing in another messy and ill considered product into the mix I would recommend that they go back to their word list and instead of generating it automatically that they instead review it with actual native cantonese speakers there are about 100 million of them world wide to make sure they are using the spoken forms and then resubmit the app        Not Smart Not spoken Cantonese