Is Cantonese an Easy or Difficult Language?

Cantonese is at the same time extremely easy and extremely difficult. Its grammar is so simple that it can be learned in only a few hours, but learning how to write correctly will require months (or, more probably, years). Let's look at each of those aspects in more detail.

Learning How to Write Is Very Hard

Cantonese uses Chinese characters, just like Mandarin. Unlike English, which uses an alphabet, Chinese writing is based on characters, with each character representing a concept or meaning. Most words are made up of two or more characters combined together.

To be able to understand the meaning of a text correctly, you need to know more or less 2,000 characters, and learning them will require a lot of study and time. At the beginning, you will only be able to recognize a character without knowing how to write it, and after some practice, you will also learn how to write it correctly.

Cantonese Has Many Tones

Cantonese is a tonal language like many other languages in Asia. This means that the same sound can have different meanings depending on the tone you use. Changing the tone can completely change the meaning of a word.

Unlike Chinese, there are six tones (even if some linguists say that in total there are nine). Moreover, Cantonese uses numbers to represent tones, and not accents or symbols above letters, which might look very strange at the beginning.

Here is a famous example using the word si to show you how it can change:

For learners whose native language is English or another non-tonal language, this can be very strange at first. It takes time to train your ears to hear the different tones and your voice to produce them correctly.

The Grammar Is Very Simple

While the writing system and tones are difficult, Cantonese grammar is actually very simple compared with many European languages. There are very few rules you have to memorize, and most learners find it easy.

Verbs Never Change

There are no verb conjugations, so verbs do not change depending on the subject. There are also no verb tenses like in English. For example, the verb 食 (sik6) means to eat, but also eats, ate, and will eat. If you really want to specify if an action happened in the past, is happening now, or will happen in the future, you can use time words or small grammar particles to show this, like today, now, or yesterday.

There Are No Articles or Plurals

There are no articles like a, an, or the. This will seem very strange to you at first, but actually, a language can work perfectly without them. Moreover, nouns usually do not change to show singular or plural, and the context usually makes clear if you are talking about one or multiple things.

There Is Only One Kind of Pronoun

Pronouns are also very simple. For example, the word 我 (ngo5) is used where English would use I, me, my, or mine. The meaning depends on the sentence rather than changing the word itself.

But There Are Classifiers

One grammar feature that may be new to English speakers is classifiers. Like many other Asian languages, in Cantonese, you usually cannot put a number directly before a noun. Instead, you use a classifier between the number and the noun. Different nouns use different classifiers, although some are much more common than others.

For example, instead of saying three books, Cantonese says 三本書 (saam1 bun2 syu1). Here, the word saam1 means three, the word syu1 means books, and the word bun2 is the classifier used specifically for books or similar objects.