[gfaure]

> - Characters starting with the vowel i sound more an e. Therefore, "to invite", 請 (cing2), sounds more like ceng2, and "to hear/listen", 聽 (ting1), sounds more like teng1.

As a Cantonese speaker, I love the effort here! However, the above isn't correct. This is an example of vernacular vs. literary pronunciation, and 請 has both pronunciations, depending on context. For instance, 請 is ceng2 when used as the verb "to invite", but cing2 in compounds like jiu1 cing2 邀請.

It shouldn't be conflated with the phenomenon later in that same paragraph about 懶音 "lazy pronunciation".

[fearedbliss]

Thanks for that! Yup I'm well aware of the differences between literary and casual (and of course the differences between Standard Chinese and Written Cantonese). My goal for this project is to help preserve and teach the Cantonese language based on my understanding (which is still improving), but more importantly teaching it as a completely independent language because that's what it is. In this instance Standard Chinese or any sort of literary pronunciation is essentially useless to me since people aren't speaking that way, and I also am a strong believer of writing the way you speak. Mandarin speakers also used to have this problem until the mid 1800s when the transition from 古文 to 白話 took place, and standardized on Beijing dialect.

And you are definitely right about 懶音. They are both explained in the same section not because they are the same thing but because they are both modifications occuring for the sound pronunciations.

[gfaure]

> In this instance Standard Chinese or any sort of literary pronunciation is essentially useless to me since people aren't speaking that way

Thank you for creating this! But I'm afraid this is the misunderstanding -- words like san1 cing2 申請 are very much everyday words, even though the reading of the character is deemed literary. You should think of characters like 請 and 聽 as just having multiple in-context pronunciations, some of which you should learn, some of which you probably don't need to.