[Andrew W Scott]

I have recently been doing a bit of self-study on Cantonese and I would love to meet up with someone who speaks Cantonese (preferably someone whose mother tongue is Cantonese) to ask a long list of questions I have.

So far I have memorised the English names of all 214 radicals (部首), and listed out the 100 most commonly used characters. I have searched the internet and found the meanings and pronunciation (in Cantonese and Putonghua) of all top 100 characters and also of all the radicals (部首) that are not in the top 100 but are characters in their own right as well as being radicals (部首).

But the problem is that different websites have different pronunciations, usually the difference is tone but sometimes the difference is in the the spelling of the whole syllable (for example the character 說 is pronounced as either syut, seoi or jyuht depending on where you look). I do realise that some characters have more than one meaning and different meanings have different pronunciations. Another problem is that quite a few characters are difficult to define as characters on their own - it becomes much easier when you put them with another character to make a proper compound word.

Nevertheless, for memorisation purposes I would like to memorise a "best definition" of each character on its own if I can, and also establish the correct Cantonese pronunciation. Also I would like to know the most commonly used (or at least a very commonly used) compound word for each character. When I say compound word I mean like a two character word that has a more specific meaning. These compound words help me to memorise the individual characters.

For example, there is something you see absolutely everywhere in Hong Kong, especially on the MTR. It is 小心, which is pronounced síusām. So when I memorise that 小心 (síusām) means "be careful", and that the phrase "be careful" is literally "small heart", I just instantly memorised the characters that mean "small", "heart" and "be careful", and their correct pronunciation.

I don't know how long it would take, but it would be well over an hour I think, maybe even several hours. Is anyone who speak Cantonese willing to help me? Of course I'll pay for lunch or dinner or whatever while we do it. And if you need any English help at all of course I'll help. I'm just looking for something friendly and informal with someone who likes to help others (as I do), not an actual Cantonese teacher, because at the moment I don't have time to take proper lessons on a structured basis. Any native or fluent Cantonese speaker would definitely know the answers I am looking for.

Of course this Cantonese speaker would have to speak a bit of English too so that we can communicate, but if you can read this post I just made, your English is definitely good enough. I guess owning a dictionary would help too, although I think I have all the definition possibilities already on my laptop.