I do not speak, read, or write Chinese, specifically Cantonese unlike my bilingual parents, but I do understand some spoken Cantonese. While I know what the ingredients used in the recipes are called in Cantonese, I have to look up the Chinese characters. The romanization of the Chinese characters used in this blog is Jyutping and is one of the latest schemes to represent Chinese characters and pronunciation using roman letters. I use this website as my reference to produce the Jyutping romanization and the Chinese characters. All of the following information comes from that website:
Jyutping is one of the latest Cantonese romanization systems promoted by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK). The Chinese language is a tonal one (both Mandarin and Cantonese). Each word may be pronounced in as many as six different ways and each tone will make the meaning of the word different. Jyutping uses numbers (1-6) to represent each of these tones, which are notated after each word. The tones are:
- Tone 1: high level flat (or falling)
- Tone 2: rising to high level
- Tone 3: mid level flat
- Tone 4: low level falling
- Tone 5: rising to mid level
- Tone 6: low level flat
