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Conversion |
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The purpose of this conversion tool is not to act as a complete course of study. Nor is this a beginners Mandarin course for Cantonese speakers. This is a learning tool to help Cantonese speakers learn Mandarin more rapidly and to ease the process of adding vocabulary from Cantonese to Mandarin.
To effectively use the conversion chart, one should be thoroughly familiar with both Yale Cantonese Romanization and Mandarin pinyin . Links to audio files will be provided, but understanding the romanization systems will greatly increase the usefulness of this tool.
Sounds and tones will be treated separately. While both the sound and the tone components are needed to produce a proper phoneme, the sound and tone relations are for the most part independent of each other. An important exception to this independence is given further attention in the section on Tone Conversion.
The sound conversion chart not only functions as reference for looking up words in dictionaries that have only Mandarin pinyin indexes, it is also useful for direct study. By paying attention to the bolded entries in the Mandarin column, a person can quickly learn to guess the proper pronunciation of words not previously encountered in Mandarin. Combined with a comprehension of the tone conversion chart, studying the sound mappings will allow one to closely approximate Mandarin pronunciation of a character in the majority of cases.