> one of the few languages where characters have no direct relation to phonetics
nit: It's not accurate to say that the characters have no direct relation to phonetics. Thousands of them are semanto-phonetic compounds, meaning they combine a character relating to the word's (or syllable's) meaning with a character relating to pronunciation. Sinitic languages tend to have a lot of homophones or near-homophones, so this approach works reasonably well as a memory aid once you've memorized a bunch of the basic characters.
One problem is that many of the pronunciations have drifted from the Middle Chinese pronunciation of the words. Also, some of them have been simplified in Simplified Chinese which makes the components a bit harder to discern.
I've been learning some Cantonese recently and this is very apparent with certain common Cantonese words. For example, the first-person pronoun in Cantonese is pronounced ngo, with a low-rising tone, and written like this:
If you enlarge it, you'll see that the left side is the same 我 from before. The right side is 鳥, which means "bird" (https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/161/). So if you saw this character and knew the basic characters for the pronouns and the word "bird", and you spoke Cantonese, you'd be able to easily understand what it meant.
Here's another one. The word "ngo" with still a different tone means "hungry". How do we write it?
What does 食 mean? It's the verb "to eat". So if you saw this 餓 character and knew a couple of other basic characters, you could figure out that it's the word "ngo6" meaning "hungry". Many of the characters still work like this although the sound shift I mentioned above means that some work in some Chinese languages and not others.
Native Cantonese speaker here, glad that you are interested in learning Cantonese.
I am working with other volunteers to improve Cantonese teaching, and wonder what difficulties you have encountered when learning Cantonese, and what materials or communities would be helpful for Cantonese learners.
nit: It's not accurate to say that the characters have no direct relation to phonetics. Thousands of them are semanto-phonetic compounds, meaning they combine a character relating to the word's (or syllable's) meaning with a character relating to pronunciation. Sinitic languages tend to have a lot of homophones or near-homophones, so this approach works reasonably well as a memory aid once you've memorized a bunch of the basic characters.
One problem is that many of the pronunciations have drifted from the Middle Chinese pronunciation of the words. Also, some of them have been simplified in Simplified Chinese which makes the components a bit harder to discern.
I've been learning some Cantonese recently and this is very apparent with certain common Cantonese words. For example, the first-person pronoun in Cantonese is pronounced ngo, with a low-rising tone, and written like this:
我 https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/1/
The word for goose in Cantonese is also "ngo", but with a different tone. Here's the character for that:
鵝 https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/1200...
If you enlarge it, you'll see that the left side is the same 我 from before. The right side is 鳥, which means "bird" (https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/161/). So if you saw this character and knew the basic characters for the pronouns and the word "bird", and you spoke Cantonese, you'd be able to easily understand what it meant.
Here's another one. The word "ngo" with still a different tone means "hungry". How do we write it?
餓: https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/740/
In this one the phonetic component is on the right instead, which is a bit inconsistent. The left side is this:
食: https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/116/
What does 食 mean? It's the verb "to eat". So if you saw this 餓 character and knew a couple of other basic characters, you could figure out that it's the word "ngo6" meaning "hungry". Many of the characters still work like this although the sound shift I mentioned above means that some work in some Chinese languages and not others.