Basic Cantonese

Virginia Yip is Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Stephen Matthews is Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. They are the authors of Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar (1994, 2nd edition 2011), The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (2007, Cambridge University Press), and co-directors of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre.

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• Introduction 1 Consonants 2 Vowels and diphthongs 3 Tone 4 Pronouns 5 Possession: ge 6 Possession and existence: yáuh 7 Being: haih 8 Noun classifiers 9 Adjectives 10 Adverbs of manner 11 Adverbs of time, frequency and duration 12 Comparison: gwo and dī 13 Prepositions: space and time 14 Negation 15 Verbs of motion: heui and làih 16 Verbs of giving: béi 17 Verbs and particles 18 Actions and events: jó and gwo 19 Activities: gán and jyuh 20 Auxiliary verbs 21 Passives 22 Word order and topicalization 23 Yes/no questions 24 Wh-questions 25 Sentence particles 26 Imperatives 27 Requests and thanks 28 Numbers, dates and times Key to exercises Glossary of grammatical terms