Introducing the Jyutping Animal Farm Project

While there is consensus that using Jyutping is an essential best-practice for learning Cantonese, there is a woeful dearth of available material beside short children’s picture books. Even when annotated with Jyutping, some of these were written in literary Standard Written Chinese style. For intermediate learners and above, there was only The Little Prince (2021), translated by Thomas Tsoi and annotated by a team led by Chaak, which fulfilled the dual criteria of (1) prose in Cantonese, and (2) co-located Jyutping for every character.

Thomas and I had been in touch to annotate his translation of Orwell’s The Animal Farm. The Cantonese-Jyutping Animal Farm numbers 46,000 characters, double the length of The Little Prince, and will be available in several versions. All versions will be left-right bilingual, with numbered paragraphs.

The standard version carries Jyutping on every character, with balanced weighing between Chinese characters and Jyutping. Paragraphs are numbered for easy reference. The standard version is designed to be printed on A4-portrait.

The “Large Jyutping” version makes the Jyutping much larger (and sacrifices the equal width rhythm in the Chinese characters). This is an excellent choice for learners who emphasize oral proficiency over reading-writing of Chinese characters. This was designed for A4-landscape printing.

Both of the above (bilingual standard, bilingual Large Jyutping) will be available as PDFs (160-200 pages) and, extending Thomas’ spirit of making this work available to the community, free to download. You can download Chapter 1 here, and the rest available by July.

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In addition there are graded “Ladder” versions. The core ideas are that

• if a learner choose the right 300 characters to learn (to recognize), they will be able to
  • read 2/3 of most Cantonese prose, while balancing
  • characters that are productive for writing (and future full literacy)
• 300 characters recognition (with writing for ~120) are plausible
  • in one year of (not intensive) study
  • provided that curriculum and learning materials align

I have opened discussions with different Cantonese teaching institutions, to try to align the levels at 316 and beyond to match existing course progressions. Later next year it is expected that a 1000 and 3000 character Ladder version will also be available.

Narration-synchronized versions, similar to the radio drama treatment, will follow in Q4. The graded versions and (est) 5-hr audio will be accessible with a Pass, or available separately for about USD $30.