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Inject Jyutping is a new Chrome extension that simply does what it says: it adds Jyutping romanisation onto Cantonese texts you see on the internet. This comes in the form of Ruby characters, i.e. small pronunciation guides on top of characters, which are common in all languages that use Chinese characters except Cantonese—until now.

This extension is so simple that you can already see the result in the image above, so this will be more of a recommendation than a review. I love it so much because it does one simple thing so well, but can be immensely helpful towards learners. It’s exactly what I aim to do for the transcriptions in our upcoming Cantonese podcast for intermediate-advanced learners.

Since it’s a Chrome extension, don’t forget that the new Microsoft Edge can use it as well.

How it works

It’s just one button. Literally. Click it, and you get jyutping plastered all over whatever Chinese text that happens to be on your screen.

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Sinitic languages family tree.

Since the turn of the 20th century, languages in southern China suffered a downturn that extended from high society to the lower classes. When leaders that spoke southern languages began to extol the northern language Mandarin, they quickly propelled the entire society to follow suit.

Our story begins in 1895, when the Qing government lost the First Sino-Japanese War. It was perceived by the rulers as utter humiliation to lose to a nation that once kowtowed to the empire.

Since then, Chinese people increasingly studied abroad in Japan and Western countries, in hopes of bringing home foreign knowledge and know-how.

One of the ideas imported from the West was racialism (racism)—not the ensuing discrimination, but the fundamental idea of dividing human beings into ‘races’.

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Hong Kong protest scene

When I started writing the first part of this post, I didn’t anticipate that I would be writing a part two. Yet here I am, because the sheer longevity of the movement (following the legacy of the Umbrella Movement) has created a jargon of its own.

First, let’s delve into the differences within the pro-democratic faction. Because if you thought protesters were all as united as they seem, you’re in for a bit of surprise…

Deep divisions

Last time, I talked about the two main factions, yellow (pro-democracy) and blue (pro-China). But divisions within the anti-government faction runs deep, and have been so for years.

To approximately describe an individual’s position on the political spectrum, the same way you say ‘moderate left’ or ‘far right’, we use nuances in the colour. 淺黃 cin2 wong4 (light yellow) would describe someone who opposes the authoritarian government, but holds values such as nonviolent protest and peaceful resolution, for example. 深黃 sam1 wong4 (deep yellow) would refer to someone supporting anything from violent protest to independence.

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Lennon Wall at the Hong Kong International Airport.

It’s been over a year since Hong Kong’s latest fight for freedom began. Over this period, the movement has come to develop its own lingo. If you have tried to figure out what people are talking or writing about the protests, you might be confused by the vocabulary that’s missing from dictionaries.

I initially created the ‘Bel Canton‘ section on this blog precisely for something like this: to document the ever-changing Cantonese language, and to keep you, lovers of Cantonese-speaking culture, up to date. Now, let’s tread some dangerous ground, and find out what these *ahem* pesky troublemakers *ahem* are babbling behind your backs!

The Factions

Hong Kong, like many other societies, has been rapidly polarised over the past years. Today, instead of left- or right-leaning political views, there are colour-based factions.

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Only my closest, language-loving friends know this, but I’ve been dabbling quite a lot. Since my last project to learn Polish, it’s been sort of a bit of this and a bit of that…Kazakh was a bust (I admitted I was dabbling), and my serious Icelandic project lost steam because our plans for a family trip are ruined by coronavirus.

For the past month, I’ve been actively dabbling in Hebrew. I actually started a while ago, trying out the language on Duolingo, but I gave up because the sentences often had no audio. (Since Hebrew doesn’t write vowels, audio is very important.) Since I finally forked out for Glossika a month or two ago for Icelandic, I thought, why not give Hebrew a try again?

Around a month later, I took my first Hebrew lesson online.

And here I am, making it official. I’m properly studying Hebrew!

I’ll still be working on my other languages — I’m still very much in love with Polish, and I’m having fun learning Taiwanese Hokkien with my friends. But hey, it’s my focus.

But why?

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Hong Kong International Airport

When people and blogs talk about reasons to learn Cantonese, they talk about travelling to Hong Kong, or perhaps Macau and Gwongdung. They talk about the golden age movies and martial arts flicks from Hong Kong, and 90s Cantopop. Oh and there are almost as many native speakers as German.

If you are passionate about these things, you already have very good reasons to learn Cantonese. And you should absolutely go for it! But things have changed over the past decades, and Cantonese-language culture has grown and evolved, especially online.

And I am here to tell you that, whether you already have plans to learn it or have merely entertained the idea once or twice, now—mid 2020—is a better time to learn Cantonese than ever before. Now is the time to take action and make those dreams of understanding a completely new culture come true.

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I’ve been hearing a lot about this new app Drops lately. It sounded a lot like Memrise with a different business model, but my podcaster friends seemed excited about it, so I decided to check it out. After all, its premise is to spend just 5 minutes a day (hence the name), so what’s the harm?

When I first opened up the app, I noticed how beautiful it looks. I don’t judge book by their cover, but I do appreciate the importance of visual design—it helps encourage users to open them.

The basic premise of the app is its laser-sharp focus on vocabulary and nothing else. It divides all the words (which is a LOT) into 13 general categories like “food and drinks” and “travel and vehicles”, which are further broken down into finer topics.

For beginners, you have to start each general category with the first topic under it. Intermediate users have access to more topics right from the get go.

Home screen of Drops

For this review, I’ve been using the app to learn Polish vocabulary. I have a good foundation in the language, so I skipped into the intermediate level (which is an option that thankfully the app has). A few of my comments will be specific to Polish, but I believe the features are identical for other languages. I can safely assume that the vocabulary is the same across languages too: I noticed this from certain duplicate words in Polish, not unlike years ago in Glossika.

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Oops, I might have been too carried away by the project itself, as well as all the crazy travelling I’ve been doing this summer, and skipped the 2 month update! (Seriously, imagine being stranded by two typhoons over one weekend in a city that is served by only one airline. How glorious.) So what happened was I set aside all the studying around the latter half of last month, then went all-in to enjoy the music festival that I mentioned. It was great. I even got my music performed in a foreign country, which I’d never thought about. So feel free to give it a listen before I talk about my experience after the break!

So, how well did my final sprint and self-testing go?

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If you’re a follower of the Cantonese-centric part of my blog, you might have heard about the Cantonese Conversations project elsewhere. It is an initiative that Olly Richards and I, among others, took a while ago to create a set of Cantonese learning materials that are completely organic and natural, in order to fill the gap of listening/reading materials on the intermediate/advanced level. It is a package of video/audio recordings of native conversations, together with a written transcript, Jyutping transcription and my English translation.

It came out officially a few months back, and recently I’ve been working on putting out a revised version, particularly focusing on proofreading the Jyutping. And that got me thinking: if I assume correctly, the majority of users will be reading the Jyutping instead of the Chinese script. And there’s a troubling thing about Cantonese: not only does it lack standardisation, but it is also undergoing a number of pronunciation changes. What that means is if you listen to us native speakers, there will be multiple ways of pronouncing the same words. We hardly even notice the differences, even though they tend to sound drastically different to foreign ears.

In the Jyutping transcriptions inside the package, we aim to

  1. represent the recording as accurately as possible,
  2. expose the reader to different pronunciations, and
  3. limit the number of varieties to make sure readers can still recognise them as the same word.

And quite often, these goals came into conflict, and we had to try and strike a balance. So halfway through the revision process, I thought I’d take to my own blog to explain some of the most common divergent pronunciations, so that it is still possible to recognise the words under different guises. The following pairs of sounds are often called ‘lazy sounds‘ (懶音 laan5 jam1) by native speakers. Chinese teachers will tell you one of them is right and one is wrong, while younger people would say one is newer and one is outdated. The fact is that they’re both in use, so I suggest you use either one yourself, but make sure to get acquainted with both of them. Here we go!

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