What's Jyutping?

 

Jyutping 粵拼 is a romanization scheme designed and recommended by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. Jyutping displays Cantonese pronunciation with English letters and tone numbers. For example, the Cantonese pronunciation of 廣東海綿 is represented as gwong2 dung1 hoi2 min4 in Jyutping. 

 

This website uses Jyutping throughout so you can learn the Cantonese pronunciation easily. If you are not familiar with the romanization scheme, please take a look at the guidelines below.

 

Jyutping could be challenging to read at first, as some letters are pronounced differently than in English. I have listed below some "special cases" for your reference.

 

ng - pronounced as "gn" in gnaw

z - pronounced as "j" in jam

c - pronounced as "ch" in chart

j - prounounced as "y" in yellow

 

i - pronouced as "ee" in see

u - prounounced as "oo" in cooper

e - pronounced as "air" (without the "r" sound) in fair

ei - pronounced as "ay" in say

eoi - pronounced as "oy" in toy

o - pronounced as "oo" (without the "r" sound) in door

ou - pronounced as oh

au - prounounced as "ow" in cow

aa - pronounced as "ar" (without the "r" sound) in far

 

Note that the end of consonants does not need to be pronounced very clearly in Cantonese. For example, the "k" in 色 sik1 is pronounced very softly, almost silent.

 

Jyutping uses the below six numbers to represent the Cantonese tones. The examples are provided by The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (http://www.lshk.org).

 

Tone 1: high level (e.g. 夫 fu1)

Tone 2: mid rising (e.g. 虎 fu2)

Tone 3: mid level (e.g. 副 fu3)

Tone 4: low falling (e.g. 扶 fu4)

Tone 5: low rising (e.g. 婦 fu5)

Tone 6: low level (e.g. 父 fu6)

 

You can hear the six tones here (the audio was provided by Cantonese.ca).