The mission
Hambaanglaang Jyutman is a community collaboration that explores Hong Kong, Cantonese and Asian cultures through storytelling and activities in Cantonese.
Hambaanglaang’s mission is to publish 500 Cantonese stories to reach a critical mass of stories to enable these to be made available for free forever.
Hambaanglaang is run by more than 70 volunteers, contributing to story writing, illustration, editing, voice recording, website design and operation, book layout, and outreach.
Graded readers
Using a graded method is the fastest way to learn a language. Hambaanglaang took the 8000 most frequently used Cantonese words and arranged them by frequency to create a graded scale. The resulting reading books were written to this scale, enabling the learning of the highest frequency words.
Colloquial Cantonese, Jyutping and Graphical Jyutping
Written in colloquial Cantonese, these reading books focuses on speaking first. Jyutping romanisation is provided for each character to help with pronunciation. Hambaanglaang also developed graphical Jyutping to provide further visual aids to understand the six tones in Cantonese.
Open Source Resources
The reading books open source resources – available in PDF, audio and video, together with a Graphical Jyutping Generator can all be found on https://hambaanglaang.hk.
How to Support
There are many ways to support the project, you can:
- buy a hard copy of the books
- make a one-off and/or regular donations at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hambaanglaang
- contribute content – the project is currently looking for English story writers – get in touch with the project to find out more!