Cantonese Romanization

I am really having a hard time with Cantonese romanization. Almost every book about Mandarin or Cantonese talk about the difficulty of tones and describe how one syllable can have different meanings depending on the tone used. Add to this the number of homonyms for each syllable for each tone and the number of similar syllables can reach up to the tens and twenties. Seeing it written down in English makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint exactly what the meaning is. That is why one of my criteria for choosing study materials is to make sure that Chinese characters are included to give me some sort of visual recognition to help me correlate meaning, sound, and tone. Without the characters, I can guess the meaning, but it can vary wildly if I don't have the Chinese character to let me know if mh means 'five' or 'not'.