Finally, I have persuaded my wife to go to Mandarin class. She had her first class last Thursday. OK, this was not her first attempt, but at least I regard this as a new beginning. There is always hope.

Coming back from the class that night, my wife started firing all kinds of pronunication questions at me. The biggest challenge for a Cantonese speaker to learn Mandarin, or Mandarin speaker learning Cantonese, is to figure out how different characters sound in the other language. We are talking about thousands of Chinese characters here.

In one question, she asked, “How do you say 鞋[haai4](shoe) in Mandarin?”. I replied [xie2]. “It is so different! How am I supposed to deduce it?!” Well, my answer is, you are not supposed to.

Many people have the misconception that with some deduction rules, you can pretty much map the Cantonese sounds to Mandarin, and vice versa, perhaps with some exceptions. The fact is, the number of exceptions is so huge that you might as well throw away the deduction rules.

Here you can find a conversation table between Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations. Let’s see how we would pronounce the Cantonese sound [ban] in Mandarin. Accordingly to the table, it could be [bin], … or [ben], … or [pin], … or [bing]. Thanks for the advise!

When people ask me how to say a Chinese character in Mandarin, I do not look up or recall from memory any conversation table or deduction rule. I simply try to recall the sound from memory. If I cannot do it directly, I try to associate it with a word or even a phrase. If I cannot recall it still, I will look up the dictionary, not any conversation table or deduction rule.

For example, my wife asked me the pronunication of the character 節 [zit3]. I recalled directly from memory that it should be [jie]. But then I couldn’t remember the exact tone. So I tried to think of a word that contain the character, for example “節目” (program). Then I tried to recall the Mandarin radio I used to listen to a lot, and all the times the word “program” was mentioned. I tried to say the word aloud a few times, trying it with different tones. It turned out to sound most correct to me in the 2nd tone.

How did I manage to memorize all the pronunciations? Some readers might still remember the post about my determination to learn the Mandarin pronunciations using SRS. Here is the update, I failed … utterly. In fact, it lasted for only 2 weeks or so. SRS has been very effective to me in learning French and Spanish vocabulary, but when it comes to Mandarin pronunciations, it just does not work. Learning the meanings of some vocabulary is one thing, memorizing how each character sounds in a completely different thing. I later learned that the most effective way is to listen to a lot of Mandarin content, and let the sounds sink into my mind along with the associated context. One day, I will subconsciously recall the sound when it is needed.

Many language learners plan to learn Mandarin and then somehow ‘convert’ their Mandarin into Cantonese (or vice versa). Consider many Romantic languages are closely related, I never heard of anyone who has learned one Romantic language and somehow use rules to convert it to another Romantic language. Similarly, one simply has to learn Mandarin and Cantonese as individual languages. Don’t forget there are also different grammatical rules and usages.

Not only is the “conversion” approach inefficient, it is simply wrong.