It was more than a year ago we announced our hopes to launch a site for everyone interested in learning Cantonese. Well... today we're proud to announce exactly that with the release of CantoneseClass101.com.

We're very lucky to be able to do this site in partnership with the folks at Innovative Languages, and have been working closely with a team from Hong Kong and Guangzhou on content production for the last few months. Those of you familiar with other ILL products will know the general approach: the focus is on teaching basic Cantonese through a progressive lesson series that starts with the expectation of no knowledge whatsoever. There is a strong bias in the curriculum towards beginner materials and the dialogues are relatively straightforward. The lesson format and style of the website will also be familiar to users of other ILL websites. More elementary and intermediate Cantonese lessons are scheduled for the beginning of next year.

We are still interested in doing Popup Cantonese in some capacity in the future. If and when we go down that route, it will probably be with more niche lessons designed for advanced speakers who have some mastery of mandarin and a degree of comfort with more exploratory learning materials. That said, even if you already speak mandarin, don't let this stop you from checking out the site the next time you're planning to go to Hong Kong and are looking to learn Cantonese in a hurry. You can master a lot of Cantonese on the 24-hour Beijing-Kowloon express....

As always, feedback and suggestions are genuinely appreciated either here or on CantoneseClass101 itself.

Best,

--david