FSI - Cantonese Basic Course

Summary

This Cantonese Basic Course is a course in spoken Cantonese. It uses all the basic grammatical structures of the language and a vocabulary of approximately 930 words. The subject matter of the course deals with daily life in Hong Kong. The course was designed to be taught in an intensive language program of 25-30 class hours a week. Students are expected to spend additional time outside of class listening to tapes of the lessons. There are 30 lessons in the course, and the rate of progress in an intensive class is expected to be approximately 2 lessons per week, including time for review and testing. Each lesson contains five sections: I) a Basic Conversation to be memorised, II) Notes, III) Pattern Drills, structural drills of the type in which the teacher's cue is the stimulus fer the students' response, IV) Conversations for Listening, a listening comprehension section, and V) Say it in Cantonese, English to Cantonese practice, much of it in conversational question-answer form, in which students activate what they have learned in the lesson. The early lessons in addition contain explanation and practice drills on pronunciation points, and some classroom phrases for the students to learn to respond to when used by the teacher.