Assimil Cantonese (Cantonais) - will not be re-printed. The hunt is on!

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willcouchman
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Assimil Cantonese (Cantonais) - will not be re-printed. The hunt is on!

Postby willcouchman » Mon Dec 05, 2022 12:48 pm

Hi all,

I have recently become interested in Cantonese (why not Mandarin, I have no idea lol).

I emailed Assimil today to see if the book for Le Cantonais is available anywhere; they sell the mp3 download audio but not the book.

They have just got back to me to say that the book will not be re-printed. The mp3 files are intended for those who already have it.

So now the hunt is on. The book is even more rare than unicorn-sprinkled gold dust. I have seen a couple of 'superpacks' on sale for somewhere in the region of $400, which is obviously ridiculously overpriced.

If anyone has come across a reasonably priced version, or has any other leads, please do let me know - I'm actually just curious as to how the book looks and how the tones are explained/presented, so I just want to flick through a copy or even a few scanned pages (Assimil sometimes do that on their website but not for this one!).

Thanks!
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crush
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Re: Assimil Cantonese (Cantonais) - will not be re-printed. The hunt is on!

Postby crush » Mon Dec 05, 2022 2:53 pm

Someone re-recorded the sentences and posted their transcripts on Youtube, you can use it to get a feel for the course:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... FyW4NccKf7

It doesn't have any explanations or anything of course, though. In my opinion, it's about par with the Mandarin course. Audio is painfully slow (think whale speech from Finding Nemo) and is not near as comprehensive as their average course for European languages. It would no doubt be useful if you could find the book, but there are other options out there for Cantonese.

The grammars "Basic Cantonese" and "Intermediate Cantonese" from Routledge (by Stephen Matthews and his wife, Virginia Yip) are great introductions to the language. Glossika also has a Cantonese course, i personally purchased the original PDF/MP3 courses (which was much cheaper: around $50 for the full 3000 sentences vs. $30/month for the current subscription-model course) and i can highly recommend that once you have a foundation in the language.

For subtitles, we have a project called CantoCaptions ("CC") which has paid translators to transcribe and subtitle a dozen or so movies and even a few entire TV shows and cartoon series.
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/fold ... _I7JcSQt-R

For getting into the spoken language and picking up vocabulary, the Cantonese Conversations at LanguageCrush.com (user leosmith's site/project) is an amazing resource. I also purchased Olly Richards' Cantonese Conversations course and can highly recommend that as well.

For reading, as there's a common misconception that Cantonese isn't written, a user from the Refold Cantonese Discord server has been documenting the available books and comics written in Cantonese, which you can check out here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... e7v0UipPw4

For a pop-up dictionary, there is support for the Migaku extensions that you can set up to handle Cantonese built using the words.hk dictionary (the most comprehensive Cantonese dictionary at present):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... W_3HDVwTjj
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willcouchman
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Re: Assimil Cantonese (Cantonais) - will not be re-printed. The hunt is on!

Postby willcouchman » Mon Dec 12, 2022 12:41 pm

Thanks for the recommendations!

The 're-recorded' Youtube playlist links to the guy's website where he has produced a translation (including romanisation) for the first 15 lessons, so yes that gives a good flavour of the course! :)

It seems he is still actively working on producing it - he's recorded all the lessons from the course, just not all the translations yet.

I'm still desperate to find a copy of the book....I've scoured everywhere and besides one on eBay I found for something like $400, there are literally 0 results anywhere else on the interwebs!
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el-malik
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Re: Assimil Cantonese (Cantonais) - will not be re-printed. The hunt is on!

Postby el-malik » Sun Dec 18, 2022 3:23 pm

I own a copy of the book and the audio. The original audio recordings were of a horrendous quality, so I'm not surprised Assimil withdrew the course. It was more surprising that no-one seemed to have conducted any quality checks before releasing the course.

The book itself is perfectly fine and contains authentic language, but for the recordings they used non-native speakers or perhaps heritage speakers who have not been exposed to standard Cantonese. I'm glad someone has taken to re-recording the lessons on Youtube. Ideally, Assimil would just hire someone in HK to re-record all the dialogues.
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willcouchman
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Re: Assimil Cantonese (Cantonais) - will not be re-printed. The hunt is on!

Postby willcouchman » Mon Dec 19, 2022 8:00 am

el-malik wrote:I own a copy of the book and the audio. The original audio recordings were of a horrendous quality, so I'm not surprised Assimil withdrew the course. It was more surprising that no-one seemed to have conducted any quality checks before releasing the course.

The book itself is perfectly fine and contains authentic language, but for the recordings they used non-native speakers or perhaps heritage speakers who have not been exposed to standard Cantonese. I'm glad someone has taken to re-recording the lessons on Youtube. Ideally, Assimil would just hire someone in HK to re-record all the dialogues.


Yeah I think if demand was higher they might do it - usually Assimil's audio is great so I don't know how they dropped the ball on this one - their most recent Hindi course was superb, but the audio was almost unusable because one of the main speakers had a speech impediment and slurred all his words together.

I've attempted to send you a PM but I think it's stuck in my outbox - would you let me know if you do receive it? I'm having problems with my messages!
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