Chapter 4 of 16 · Explore the Cantonese path
Optional reference · Chapter 4 of 16
Look up a mark, a stroke or a strange shape
Open this when a punctuation mark or an odd-looking character stops you. It covers the marks on a page, the Traditional and Simplified forms, and the characters only Cantonese uses.
≈ 5 min of reading · Practise at your own pace
What’s in this chapter
- Open this when a stroke count, a punctuation mark or a strange-looking character stops you.
- Strokes go top to bottom and left to right, and that order is what a dictionary counts.
- Cantonese books use Traditional characters; mainland Mandarin books use Simplified, and some characters differ a lot.
- Cantonese has characters no Mandarin text uses at all, and most of them carry a 口 on the left.
- A Cantonese page uses 。 for a full stop, ， for a comma and 「 」 around speech.
Nothing here is needed to finish the path. Open it when a mark or a shape stops you, and walk past it otherwise. Stroke order matters for writing and for looking a character up by hand; for reading, it matters only in that it explains why two characters that look alike are counted apart.
The marks on a Cantonese page
These marks do jobs you already know from English, even where the shape is new. They show you where a sentence ends and where somebody starts speaking.
| Mark | What it does |
|---|---|
| 。 | a full stop — a small hollow circle sitting in its own square |
| ， | a comma, also full-width |
| 、 | a list comma, used between items in a list and nowhere else |
| 「 」 | corner brackets, where English uses quotation marks: somebody is speaking |
| ？ | a question mark, though a Cantonese question often has a question word and no mark |
| 《 》 | around the title of a book or a film |
Why one word can have two written forms
The same character is written two ways in different places. Your books use the Traditional column. Compare the two so the other form does not stop you when you meet it elsewhere.
| Traditional | Simplified | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 見 | 见 | see |
| 樹 | 树 | tree |
| 風 | 风 | wind |
| 飲 | 饮 | drink |
| 問 | 问 | ask |
| 門 | 门 | door, gate |
Cantonese books, and every Cantonese book in this library, use the Traditional column. The Simplified column is here so that a character you meet elsewhere does not look like a different language.
Characters that only written Cantonese uses
Written Cantonese has its own characters for its own everyday words. Meeting them here means you will recognise them on a page rather than take them for mistakes.
- 嘅of, ’sge3我嘅貓ngo5 ge3 maau1“my cat”
- 喺at, inhai2喺山上hai2 saan1 soeng6“on the hill”
- 咗already donezo2走咗zau2 zo2“left, went away”
- 冇have notmou5It is 有 “have” with its two inner strokes taken out — the having has been emptied.冇水mou5 seoi2“there is no water”
- 嘢thingje5食嘢sik6 je5“eat something”
- 佢he, she, itkeoi5佢哋keoi5 dei6“they”
- 哋the plural mark on a pronoundei6我哋ngo5 dei6“we”
- 啲a bit; somedi1好啲hou2 di1“a bit better”
- 嚟comelai4嚟屋企lai4 uk1 kei2“come home”
- 瞓sleepfan3瞓咗fan3 zo2“fell asleep”
- 搵look for, findwan2搵水wan2 seoi2“look for water”
- 畀givebei2畀我bei2 ngo5“give me”
Notice how many carry 口 on the left. When Cantonese needed characters for its own spoken words, it built them by putting a mouth beside a character that sounded roughly right — so a mouth on the left is a fair signal that you are looking at a word Mandarin does not have.
More pieces that hint at a meaning
Look up a piece you keep seeing. Each entry gives the shape, what it is usually about, and one character built with it.
- 女womanabout women and family媽maa1“mother”
- 日sun, dayabout light and time時si4“time”
- 月moon — or fleshabout months, and confusingly also about the bodyTwo moons side by side make “friend”.朋友pang4 jau5“friend”
- 火 灬fireabout fire, heat and cookingUnderneath a character it flattens into four sparks.煙jin1“smoke”
- 土earthabout soil, ground and places地dei6“ground, land”
- 金metal, goldabout metal and money銀ngan4“silver”
- 田fieldabout farmland, and it hides inside many characters as pure shapeA field divided into four plots by its ditches.男naam4“man”
- 艸 艹grassabout plants, and it sits as a lid on topTwo blades of grass poking up over the character.花faa1“flower”
- 雨rainabout weather雪syut3“snow”
- 山mountainabout hills山saan1“hill”
These sit alongside the ones in the character section. Together they cover a large share of the characters in an ordinary book.