[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.

[fearedbliss]

Definitely. I'm not saying the word 申請 itself isn't used in normal speech, but more that the pronunciation of 請 in normal speech would sound more like an e. So I would rather teach people the normal way people would pronounce words and not the literary form, since as I said before, I also do want to stay away from Standard Chinese as much as possible and teach Written Cantonese. It will take me some time to continue to extract the essence of the language and document it at the core level. Once I've extracted the language it could (and should) be used to create full literary writings in Written Cantonese, and not need to use nor ever learn Standard Chinese. If my target audience is to speak to Cantonese people specifically and not every single person of any Chinese language in existence, then writing in Written Cantonese is enough for my purposes and goals.

I definitely appreciate the feedback :). Thank you!

[qazxcvbnm]

As a native speaker I assure you that 請 is pronounced differently in context, and that both readings are perfectly Cantonese.

For a more clear example, see 平: 大平賣 ("vernacular" reading; peng4) (lit. big cheap sale; i.e. sale) vs 平面 ("literary" reading; ping4) (lit. flat surface; i.e. surface). peng4 is the "vernacular" reading but used exclusively for meaning cheap. ping4 is "literary" but used everywhere else. "vernacular" versus "literary" is a linguistic classification, but do not necessarily represent either being more common than the other reading. Both readings exist.