Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong, Macau, and the Guangdong province of southeast China. There are also large numbers of Cantonese speakers outside of China, including communities in other parts of southeast Asia, South America, and the United States. Though often regarded as a Chinese dialect for political and cultural reasons, Cantonese differs sufficiently from Mandarin Chinese to be considered a separate language in terms of linguistics.
The content in this application shows the transliterations of the Cantonese words and phrases, along with the actual Cantonese characters used in Hong Kong. In activities that require typing, you should type the transliterations, not the Cantonese characters. This approach makes it easier for beginners to master the basic Cantonese sounds and vocabulary before tackling the writing system.
Cantonese, like Chinese, is a tonal language, in which different tones can change a word's meaning. The Yale transliteration system used for Cantonese in this application represents different tones with diacritics and the letter h, as shown in the table below.
| Number | Tone | Example 1 | Example 2 |
| 1 | High Level / High Falling | sī | yān |
| 2 | High Rising | sí | yán |
| 3 | Mid Level | si | yan |
| 4 | Low Falling | sìh | yàhn |
| 5 | Low Rising | síh | yáhn |
| 6 | Low Level | sih | yahn |
Note that both the High Level and High Falling tones are marked with the same diacritic, because these tones have become almost indistinguishable in the Hong Kong dialect of Cantonese.
You can type the diacritic marks used to mark the tones by typing the vowel, then selecting the character you want from the set of special characters which appears. For the low tones, you also have the option of selecting the vowel with the diacritic plus the h. (For example, you can type a and select àh.) See Typing accents or special characters for more information on typing.
When reading, you can use the tonal marks on the transliterations as a clue to the proper pronunciation of each word. In many of the activities, you can also listen to words as many times as you need to recognize their tones. Be sure to use the correct tones whenever you practice your Cantonese pronunciation.
In activities which show the actual Cantonese characters, you can practice reading in addition to pronunciation. The writing system shown in this content is the informal system preferred in Hong Kong. It shares many characters with Mandarin Chinese, but does not always use them with the same meaning or pronunciation. It also supplements these characters with more than a thousand additional symbols representing Cantonese sounds and concepts.