Thursday, November 02, 2006

Shopping for Books

Yesterday, I went out to TST and HK Island to look for some books for learning Cantonese. Everyone told me that I could get by quite easily with only English, but having trouble talking to a taxi driver and not knowing the names of the foods you want to eat convinced me otherwise. I went to Swindon's and Page One in TST and to Dymocks on the island. Dymocks had the best collection and the highest prices. Here is what I got:

A Cantonese Book, by Betty Hung
No Sweat Cantonese, by Amy Leung
Interesting Cantonese, by Susanna Ng

I'll try to give them a review after trying them out, but my learning style has always been to buy a lot of books for a lot of money and then not opening them.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi there!
Did you get a change to use any of those books? I just finished the sequence in Cantonese at the local city college in San Francisco (the use the old FSI materials and homemade handouts), and I'm looking for (good) additional material to keep learning.

Man of the Awa said...

hey devin. i went thru 'no sweat'. i didn't like it too much. it was a glorified phrasebook. i have a full review. just click on the 'review' category. i'm on "A Cantonese Book" now. I'll have a review up as soon as I get through it......which may take some time since i've been slacking.

Anonymous said...

I've purchased many Cantonese texts. When I was in HK I got "Interesting Cantonese" by Susanna Ng. I found it quite useful and in a different format to the typical textbook with a phrase, vocab and grammar patterns. The text instead uses common phrases which I suppose one may use in everyday conversation. For the price its a good buy.

Cheers!