Course description

Cantonese for Couples is an experimental approach for learning Cantonese with help from a native-speaker significant other. This approach comprises

1. course content (a curriculum, a set of teaching materials, and revision materials) and
2. instructor support (trainer-led sessions, office hours, and forum/Discord)

The goals are

• simple conversations, equivalent to A1 level,
• read/type Jyutping (and Chinese through Jyutping),
• through 15–30 min daily progressions
• in 12 months

Intended Audience

This course is structured for a small, specific audience. This only makes sense if you are a couple, of which one is a Cantonese native speaker (Teacher) and the other who is learning the language (Learner).

Introducing Teacher Tessa and Lenny Learner

Tessa Tam ♀ and Lenny Lopez ♂ is our fictional couple. We’ll describe some of their struggles and triumphs in the course material.

Tessa is from Hong Kong, impatient and a straight-shooter, and Lenny has a busy job. They have good intentions, but the Cantonese thing just hasn’t worked out in the last four years.

The Teacher must be literate in Chinese and English, but there is no additional assumptions that the Teacher knows anything about Cantonese pedagogy or Cantonese linguistics. (In fact, Tessa knows that Jyutping exists but it’s quite foreign to her.)

The Learner is assumed to be an adult, speaks English (but not Mandarin), and cannot attend intensive immersion studies.

I further assume the couple (Team)

• have access to a printer (the printed checklists are really useful),
• is somewhat digitally savvy (you can work out how to install apps, look things up, and use forums/Discord), and
• have access to the Cantonese Font (get it at canto.hk, it’s really good)

Goals

Here is what I’d like you to get out of the course:

Learner

Doing the minimum suggested, the Learner should be able to:

• speaking / listening: CERF A1 oral proficiency (beginner)
• reading:
  • be able to read Jyutping
  • be able to read 100 selected characters. This covers 50% of the characters in a daily transcript. By being able to convert the remaining Chinese characters into Jyutping, the Learner effectively can read any material their oral proficiency allows them to comprehend.
• writing:
  • be able to input Chinese characters through Jyutping keyboards

Take an exam!

Having a goal is motivating. For the Learner, I strongly suggest you to consider taking the Cantonese Oral Proficiency Examination (COPE)](https://cala.hk/en/cope/) in 12–18 months.

COPE, developed by the Lingustic Society of Hong Kong, purely assesses oral proficiency without a Written Chinese component. This examination is offered twice a year, and can be taken in person (in Hong Kong) or online. An examiner talks to you 1:1, adapting the conversation dynamically to probe the extent of your knowledge, and provides an assessment of your oral proficiency using the CERF scale (A0, A1, A2, or B1 / post).

Teacher

• a proper introduction to their own mother tongue (and dispel myths such as 廣東話冇文法),
• a broad introduction to current resources available, and
• a pedagogical system that can be extended after this course

Team

• quality time together
• impress the family
• for couples with / thinking of kids, progress towards a both-parents Cantonese environment

Time

The time expectation / intensity averages to daily 30 minutes for Teacher and 30 minutes for Learner, with weekends off and built-in breaks for catching up / holidays etc. (High-intent Teams / Teachers / Learners can do suggested extras.)

This 30 minutes includes practice time, so it’s not always new material.

The programme runs for in 12 months and asks for min 100 hours of Cantonese usage from the Learner. The extensions (some during the same 12 months, some after the year) would add another 150 hours.

Building in Public

The course is being built live, starting in Feb 2026. Jon is developing the course and working on it with Eli, while providing this material to you.

Schedule of Activities

The daily learning happens in the Team’s own time, and you choose when to sit down and play. I suggest a regular every day / every other day cadence — more infrequently and the Learner is going to find that he forgot too much and every session is playing catch up.

For the Teacher, I suggest reading the instructions and assembling the printable materials one week ahead.

Support: Meetings / Office Hours

I’ll be setting up irregular Teacher meetings and weekly office hours to clarify the instructions. These happen on Monday 20:00–21:30 HKT (GMT+8).

Every few months, this slot will be replaced by an irregular moderated Learner meeting, so Lenny can start speaking Cantonese to others at a similar stage.

Support: Asynchronous

There are two kinds of questions you may have: epheremal one-off questions, often of a technical nature, and more substantial questions. I have created an outlet for each of these types of questions to be addressed asynchronously:

1. On my Discord server, a #couples-情侶班 is created and can be joined through this link: These are good for the one-off quick questions. I generally monitor the Discord channel while working, so you might (sometimes) get synchronous responses.

2. on forum.canto.hk, I’ve set up a discussion board for this course. This is good for the more substantial, often linguistics questions. This is much more easy to search and follow later, and your questions can provide guidance for others in the future.

Secret Sauces

Language usage is Pareto distributed: 80% of communication uses only 20% of constructs (vocabulary and grammar). In a Cantonese dialog transcript with 180,000 characters (about thirty hours), 144,000 (80%) were the same 268 characters. I assembled data-sets of written Cantonese from different genre, and use these to inform the select of what-to-learn.

Knowing what to learn, then there’s how to learn. The science of learning, and language acquisition, are both well studied. We know that these works:

• comprehensible input
• timely, specific feedback
• spaced repetition
• interweaved lesson design
• output that matches what Learner wants to be able to do

But most course designers, teachers, or learners aren’t aware of any of these. When they encounter the first of these practices, that one practice gets latched onto. What if we build a course that uses all these practices?

Example

Spaced repetition proves effective for retention, but good lord, that sheer boredom and monotony when you’re at 10k cards. Then the little doubt every time when yourself is the only source of feedback (Hard? Easy? Is jan3caat3 good enough substitute for jan3caak3 ?), and the general lack of live language interactions, leaves Anki (and Duolingo) learners with a large vocabulary, very hard-coded interactions, and limited transfer to the real world.

Finally, as the developer of the 粵語字體 Cantonese Font, there are technical and linguistics expertise (from myself and the community) that flows into this project. You’ll often find that pesky sticking points (what are the pitch / contour for go2 go3 go4 go1?) just got re-presented in a way that there didn’t seem to be a problem to begin with. No one asks the pitch/contour question for go2go3go4go1 !

Cost

Cantonese for Couples comprises (a) course material and (b) instructor support. Both are commercial. The course material will require a Complete Pass to access and instructor support would be ticketed.

But, for the first cohort, there is no gating mechanism. What I ask for is commitment to try the whole experience, your feedback (as Learner, Teacher, and as a Team). If the plan works, and Learner gets on the royal road to Cantonese proficiency, be saang1ziu1paai4 生招牌 (living proof) 🙂

Designer

I (Jon) was a chemistry teacher, and worked with the International Baccalaureate to develop workshops for teacher trainers to train experienced teachers. I think teaching isn’t “pouring knowledge into a empty container”, but must involve creating opportunities for learners to actively engage in a way that is meaningful for their context.

Around 2021, I thought the most important challenges to Cantonese heritage is that we don’t have a way to easily prepare Jyutping-annotated material, and Jyutping’s unintuitive tone representation. Three iterations of the Cantonese Font was developed between 2022-2025 to solve these problems.

Jon 🇭🇰 is married to Eliana 🇦🇷 for ten years. This year Eli is (finally) committing to learning Cantonese. We are doing this course together.