Books on Mandarin language

There's obviously tons of books out there to teach Mandarin Chinese (普通話), but finding books that have the Traditional Characters (繁體字) is rare.  In searching for text books to get cozy with, the best book I came across is one from Taiwan called Practical Audio-Visual Chinese, 2nd Edition.  There's a whole series.

Many will undoubtedly argue against this, but I prefer Traditional Chinese characters (繁體字)  over Simplified Chinese characters (正體字) for three reasons:

1. first, the traditional characters are more artistic and culturally significant; 
2. secondly, it is easier to go from Traditional to Simplified; and 
3. thirdly, there's greater utility for traditional characters.

For latter reason, many will argue that this is not true because of the sheer number of Mandarin speakers (1st or 2nd language) in mainland China.  But given that it is easier to move to simplified characters from Traditional,  I can more easily maneuver to Simplified characters used in mainland China, and also into Japanese Kanji (日本漢字), which has different simplified characters of their own.  Additionally, I can build vocabulary in Korean, as many borrowed words can be referenced in Korean Hanja (韓國漢字), which uses traditional characters.  Naturally, in either Taiwan (台灣) and Hong Kong (香港), I can understand traditional characters.  Thus with traditional characters, my utility extends to all of East Asia, where Simplified extends to parts of mainland China.

Books for Learning Cantonese

There aren't too many books on Cantonese, and the ones out there have too many short-comings to count.  Any book that does not include Chinese characters (漢字) is simply less than worthless.  There's no common script to communicate with native speakers, needed to help coach one into speaking the sounds correctly, or to leverage off of existing Mandarin knowledge.  Many books have bizarre schemes for romanization (roman letters used to represent Cantonese) rather than the commonly used Yale, or the newer promulgated Jyutping.  Out of the limited set of books out there, there are two I found to be the most valuable: Cantonese Phrasebook by Lonely Planet, and A Cantonese Book.

The lonely planet book is comprehensive and detailed, and goes through the basic grammar, and shows the actual Chinese characters used.  I highly recommend this book.

The downside though, is that they invent their own romanization scheme, which is problematic, especially when using other material, or trying to use some input tool, like John Burket's CantoInput java application.

The A Cantonese Book is really awesome, but also uses some homegrown romanization scheme as well, and I think they do not document the initials and finals properly.  What I like is that they have drills to help distinguish unique Cantonese sound properly, which is an invaluable tool.


For a comprehensive list of published resources, check out:
http://lc.ust.hk/HASALD/newsletter/96newsletter/96geoff.htm.

I'm an American Student in Hong Kong

I'm just dabbling in Cantonese.  Here's a sample sentence of "I'm an American student":

Cantonese:

• 我係美國學生喺香港。
• ngó hai méi-gwok hok-sàang hái hèung-góng

Mandarin:

• 我是美國學生在香港。
• wǒ shì měi-guó xué-shēng zài xiāng-gǎng.