REPLACER (online for free members) now has a very complete Cantonese to English dictionary. You can past up to a 1000 characters and have a sequential list of all the words. IN addition to a full English definition, there are 3 different "romanization" methods, two of which will be familiar to most Cantonese learners. Sidney Lau developed a romanization method many years ago... and, more recently, Jyutping was developed. You will notice that Jyutping borrowed heavily from Lau, however there are differences between the two that may assist you in "hearing" the spoken word easier.

The third romanization method is something new. Years ago, a linguist friend mentioned that all text... books, articles, blogs, etc-- are simply "exo-somatic memory methods." What he meant was that people write down things (exo-somatic, ie outside the body) that need to be remembered, and once written down, the book or article can be picked up to remind you--- rather than the person having to remember the printed text.

The trouble with most language's text is that it is not necessarily "phonetic", and, all the information for pronouncing the word is not on the page. In other words, some information must already be known (inside the reader's mind). What we wanted to develop was a romanization method for Cantonese and Mandarin that required as little memory as possible. In other words, could we develop a method that "pushes" all the required information for pronunciation to the page, rather than have the learner learn something new?

We wanted to push as much information to the page as much as possible so that the reader had virtually NOTHING to remember. With one glance, using what he already knew, he could come as close as possible to pronouncing accurate Cantonese (or Mandarin or French or Spanish, etc). Our original goal was to be able to give the reader less than one minute of training, and be able to read out loud Cantonese.

Take tones for example. Many romanization methods use numbers for tones. What this means is that a new student must go through some type of mental gyration to remember what the 3rd tone sounds like in this language, and if he's studying a different tonal language, then that 3 might be a completely different tone. We wanted a method where there was nothing to remember. A complete novice, with only a minute or two of training, could start making the correct tones...and be understood by a native speaker.

A second issue with both Cantonese and Mandarin romanization methods is that they were both developed on British phonemes. That's fine if you happen to have grown up

in a country speaking Received Pronunciation English. But, if you are American, then you virtually have to relearn how to read the same printed words. Why have the extra step?

We developed 2 solutions. First, for tones (or pitches), we use a visual method so that you immediately see, just like musical notes, how to pronounce the pitch. We've had 80 year olds be able to immediately speaking the correct tones.

For the second problem, we converted the British phonemes into a loose version of the phonemes of the CMU PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY. The CMU method has resulted in the best version of text to speech using Artificial Intelligence, so we started there. One difference is that the CMU methods uses 2 to 3 letters to write down a phoneme, rather than the one-letter method used by Juitping, Pinyin and IPA. We used a loose version of the CMU because (at least in our use) there were easier letter combinations than CMU.

Why not use the International Phonetic Alphabet? The IPA uses one letter per sound, that means you have to remember to pronounce each sound. Learning IPA is a great thing... we recommend to learn it using or APL modules.. but, we wanted a method where a typical American reader could (almost) instantly sound out what he saw on the page..and, sound as close as possible to Cantonese.

Let's try it:

STEP ONE: say out loud the following words: may, say, bay, Kay

STEP THREE: Now, let's add some pitch changes. Simply look at the dots and change the pitch:

STEP THREE: Ask a friend to listen to you say the words and alter your pitch. Can they hear you start with a mid-level pitch, go up, then way down, and finally go from low upwards?

Want to see it in action? Become a free member of our website and look for REPLACER on the member page. Then, paste in some Cantonese...choose "by character" and use the "Cantonese English (full)" dictionary. Click "vocabulary... and, you will see a display of the Cantonese words in sequence... the 3 romanization methods... and the English definition.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Coming soon... Mandarin! Using the same method.