CanTalk vs Learn Cantonese with Big Data

Unlock the mystery of Cantonese and speak it with flair! CanTalk is a Cantonese learning App produced by the Cantonese teachers of the Center for Language Education of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for the HKUST community. It helps users to acquire the practical vocabulary and expressions needed for daily interactions with Cantonese speakers on and off campus. It is for beginners who wish to use Cantonese to: • make friends • get around in Hong Kong • go yum-cha and pig out in food stalls • shop and practice the art of bargaining • live the full Hong Kong experience FEATURES • Adopts a communicative and thematic approach • Designed on a Need-to-Know basis for beginners • 4 Units: Making Friends, On the Move, Pigging Out, Partaking in the Fun • Extras: Sound System, Grammar Cards, Culture Cards, Glossary • Real-life characters in real-life scenarios • Engaging and interactive tasks with videos and pictures USER REGISTRATION FOR: (https://project.cle.ust.hk/cantalk) • HKUST students & staff • Family and friends of HKUST members (each HKUST member may register up to 10 accounts for their family and friends) • Invited guests FEEDBACK If you have anything to share with us, please send your feedback to lccantalk@ust.hk. Join CanTalk for the full Hong Kong experience!

A Self-learning Open Platform of Chinese This mobile app is a self-learning open platform of the Chinese language (including Cantonese). The platform draws on corpus linguistic technology and linguistic knowledge, such as usage frequencies of characters and words, word collocations, high frequency words, etc. The platform intends to provide Chinese language information and examples which are close to what are being used in daily life. This approach can help the users to learn and master the Chinese language in a more effective manner. Frontline teachers, dictionary compilers and learning materials designers can also benefit from this platform for curriculum design and teaching materials development. Highlighted features of the platform: - input of Chinese characters with photo-taking and OCR - use of Chinese language corpus (big data) - basic lexical information: parts-of-speech, stroke numbers, radical, display of the order of strokes - usage information of words: usage frequency, verb-noun collocation, classifier-noun collocation - other information: correspondence of vocabulary in South Asian languages (Urdu, Nepali, Hindi)