A Corpus of Cantonese Characters

write them right

Modern Cantonese still preserves many traits of Middle Chinese in terms of both pronunciation and wording. It is therefore common that certain characters/words used in colloquial Cantonese are in fact derived from more ancient forms of Chinese and are unfamiliar to native Chinese (including Cantonese) speakers. As a result, it has almost become a norm that Cantonese youths do not know how to write “Cantonese characters.” Many often resort to using homophones or adding the ‘mouth (口)’ radical to accustomed characters—English-like alphabetical spelling are also used sometimes. (Frankly speaking, Flying was also one of those guilty of ‘contaminating’ Cantonese. *ashamed*)

The following list shows some of the commonly misused characters in Cantonese. I’m also trying to include some hints on how one can input these characters with a computer. While the input methods referred to below may be implemented differently in different pieces of software, they should be usable in any reasonably up-to-date systems.

A Corpus of Difficult Cantonese Characters

Please click on one of the onsets or rhymes (as in Jyutping) in the index above to load the contents.