🇭🇰 The best websites for learning Cantonese

A free practical guide to Cantonese support on iOS, macOS, Android and Windows: handwriting and Cangjie input for traditional characters, jyutping and Yale typing by sound, text-to-speech so you can hear any text read aloud, and dictation. It solves the unglamorous problem that stops people writing Cantonese at all. Narrow by design — it teaches you nothing about the language itself — and the device instructions need re-checking after major OS updates.

A Hong Kong community project publishing story books written in real Cantonese (粵文, not standard written Chinese), graded step by step and split into a series for all ages and one written specifically for teens and adults, with a video and an audio recording for every book plus lesson plans for teachers. Reading it all online is free; printed sets are sold to fund the project. This is the graded-reading resource Cantonese has always lacked, but the site is Cantonese-first and awkward to navigate, and written Cantonese looks alien at first even if you read Chinese.

A dedicated free site for the LSHK jyutping scheme — what each initial, final and tone number means, how to learn the system in one sitting, and which input methods let you type Cantonese by sound. Getting jyutping straight early is the single highest-leverage hour in Cantonese, because every good dictionary and course assumes it. The site is written mainly in Cantonese with only partial English, so pair it with a jyutping chart in English if you are starting from zero.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.