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.