Why Cantonese Heritage Speakers Should Learn Jyutping

What is Jyutping? 

Jyutping is a romanization system developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. It lets you write Cantonese using the English alphabet plus numbers (1-6) to mark tones. It is one of the main romanization systems along with Yale. Here’s a helpful video from the Cantonese Corner breaking down the differences between the two systems:

But people in Hong Kong don’t use it. Why should I bother learning it?

With Jyutping, you can improve your Cantonese even if you don’t know how to read or write characters. Let’s say you’re watching a Cantonese movie or YouTube video and you hear a word you don’t know and want to look it up. How do you go about doing this if you can’t write Chinese? Using your own romanization method might work, but there’s a chance google won’t know what you’re talking about! If you know Jyutping, you’ll be able to google it or search for it in online dictionaries like CantoDict and Pleco. Plus you can check which tone(s) the character has whenever you’re unsure.

You can use Jyutping as an input method to quickly type Chinese characters. I use a free tool called Squirrel. Type what you want to say in Jyutping (w/o tone markings) and select the correct character from a drop-down list. It’s that easy! And there are lots of shortcuts too (GDW = gwong dung waa). For me, it’s a much faster input method than writing each character manually. Note that you need to have good character recognition for this to work.

Rime’s Squirrel input method.

The system learns from user input for quicker Cantonese typing!

Most Mandarin speakers (native, heritage and learners) know basic pinyin, but very few Cantonese speakers know any standardized romanization system. This is a shame since I believe Jyutping can help a lot of heritage speakers improve their Cantonese. Check out my videos on Youtube and Patreon if you want to see Jyutping in action!

加油！

Brittany