Regardless of your level of Cantonese, if you are learning or teaching or working with Cantonese, these are some tools that would make your journey an easier one.
Hong Kong Vision – Chinese character to Cantonese Romanisation Converter
I have found this to be the most accurate, as it also often shows the variations of pronunciations that each word might have. Not everyone is a fan of Jyutping, and this tool allows conversions not just Jyutping, but also Yale, Guangdong and Sidney Lau romanisations among others.
Cantonese Tools – Jyutping Converter
Jyutping is one of the more popular Cantonese romanisation systems. Within this converter, you just plug in the text into the box on the left, and the Romanisation will appear in the box on the right. Large chunks of text can be converted at one time. However, I have noticed that for words with more than one pronunciation, it might give me the wrong one. But this website loads faster than the one above, so I might use this if I am in a hurry.
A reader has pointed out (see comment below) that this site uses the more standard pronunciation for some words, rather than the sound changes that are more common now (see this wiki article for more information) e.g 屋 (nguk instead of uk), 鴨 (ngaap instead of aap), and 愛 (nogi instead of oi). This might make it more difficult for learners.
Online Cantonese Input Method
Online Cantonese Input Method uses Cantonese romanisation to input Chinese characters. I have not used this personally, but believe this would be useful for someone who cannot type Chinese characters directly.
Forvo Cantonese
Contains pronounced words by real people. For Cantonese, it has almost 40,000 pronounced words. Choose from their list, or search for a word.
Other Cantonese Tools
including Cantonese text read aloud, tool to create worksheets with stroke order for Cantonese, Cantonese to Mandarin text. Please note The Cantonese text read aloud does not sound very natural, and I usually use Microsoft Translator for this. There are other text to speech apps too, which I will update on soon.
For More Online Cantonese Resources:
- Free Online Resources for Learning Cantonese
- Online Cantonese Dictionaries
- Vocabulary lists of Colloquial Cantonese
- Cantonese Dictionary and Translator Mobile Apps
- Free Online Cantonese Literature
Anything I Missed?
Have I missed any good resources? Or maybe you have a question about something. If so, please feel free to drop a comment on this post. Or let us know what tools have you found useful in your Cantonese learning and teaching journey.? I will continue to update this post with more resources.
I tried using the cantonesetools jyutping converter listed above. I would not recommend it since the people most likely to use it are not very familiar with a word’s standard pronunciation. It will present words like 屋 (uk), 鴨 (aap), and 愛 (oi) with a ng- sound in front such as nguk. The hongkongvision converter does not seem to have this issue.
Hi Kitty, thanks for bringing up this point. Indeed, I had not realized this, as I am familiar with both pronunciations, and hence didn’t take note. I’ll update the post to include this fact.