繼續談一下學習粵拼的心得，我對拼音掌握得不好，常常分不清正確的讀音。粵語裡面有oe和eo兩個音我便分不清。幸好用oe和eo的韻母只有六個，我便編了一個口訣來幫忙，就是「靴雙腳，居鄰出」。這六個字正好用了全部六個含oe和eo的韻母，

靴hoe1
雙soeng1
腳goek3
居geoi1
鄰leon4
出ceot1

這個口訣有點是《鄰居穿了鞋子出來》的意思。當我不肯定某字是否用那個韻母時，唸來看看是否跟其中一字押韵便知道了。

2007.12.07 [jyutping, chinese, language] - comments

前幾天開始應真練習粵拼，不過幾天已經很有成果，現在打一編長長的帖子已沒有什麼問題。以前用簡易倉頡，就算一百字之中懂打九十五個字，就是偏偏有三五個字特別難打，特別是一些筆畫少，但又不易分拆的字，真是絞盡腦汁也想不到怎樣拆。於是就是為了幾個字一編短編打了半天也打不成。現在用粵拼，固然不時會遇到不會拼的字，但是猜下猜下總會猜到。很少像倉頡會被某些字難到。現在練得多了就更得心應手，今天正是要用中文來寫這篇網志，以使學以致用。

現在的學習方法是這樣，我編了一個簡單的程式，可以把中文加上粵拼音標。然後我每天找一篇一二百字的文章標音後練打，除了一些難字以外我盡量避免查看粵拼音標，真的不懂才看。那幾個難字再記下來，明天再試打。這樣不用幾天已經掌握了粵拼音法。

2007.12.06 [jyutping, chinese, language] - comments

Initially my blog was focused on technical IT subject. Overtime I have wrote less about that and more on general topics like travel. Today I will return to a technical topic about the Jyutping(粵拼) Cantonese romanization system.

I start off with the quest to learn and master a Chinese input method. Years ago I started with the Cangjie (倉頡) system. I never get much beyond basics because it is a difficult system to learn, let alone to master. Then I looked at pronunciation based system. I am glad to find out Cantonese based system is readily available. Out of the multiple romanization system, people seems to have gravitated toward the Jyutping system by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

So the next step is to get familiar with the Jyutping system, which is not trivial for me because I am weak in phonetics. It will be very useful if there is a service to annotate a piece of Chinese text with the pronunciation under each character. Unfortunately I can find no such software besides some dictionary that does it character by character. Instead I have decided to write one myself, as a naïve translation should not be difficult to write.

Now all I need is a table of all Chinese characters and its Jyutping, i.e. the Jyutping specification. I have spent days searching the internet and come out empty handed. Linguistic Society of Hong Kong themselves provides little more than a general description. It is a shame even some links to its description are broken.

The good news is I have finally found it from the Unicode Han Database, a place I have crossed many time but have not realized they have compiled the most comprehensive data on Chinese characters, including Jyutping and even Cangjie code. With the database here I am ready for business!

(2010-02-17 Thanks Helena for the heads up. The Unihan database format has since changed. The new download link is Unihan.zip. Some general description such as Unicode NamesList File Format are also available. )

2007.11.29 [jyutping, chinese, language] - comments