Hi. I’m currently in Thailand doing some work and Oh God, avoid August. It’s raining every single day. But not all is lost! The weather gives me a good opportunity to review my Cantonese.
As I’ve decided to settle down in Macau 10 years ago, I spent the first few months there learning Cantonese by myself, with the help of 3 fantastic books. In about 5 months I was able to understand 80% of the Cantonese talked in the street (very different from the more formal one spoken on the news, for example), and after a total of 8 months, I was able to speak about 80% of it. But after 10 years now, I felt that it was time to grab the last 20%. And it’s hard. Cantonese has quite a few tones, and you can’t get those wrong. (Else you’ll probably be referring to human genitals; no kidding.)
So going through the books again, I decided to record all the vocabulary with the English translation. As usual, if it’s not fun to do and if there’s any friction, I will not do it. So I’ve built something that makes it a breeze to record new words. And once again, it’s based on the Alfred launcher.
It’s called Alfred Canto, and it can be used not only for Cantonese, but for anything that requires a word equivalence system.
It’s free. The source is available on GitHub HERE, and the Alfred workflow package itself is also available HERE.
Have fun, and happy learning.