Sidney Lau Cantonese Romanization System
Pronunciation Guide – Initials

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Sidney Lau Cantonese Romanization System:

In the Sidney Lau Cantonese Romanization System, Cantonese words are notionally made up of an optional initial sound, a final sound, and a tone. The Sidney Lau System uses numeric and symbolic superscripts to represent tones.

Sidney Lau’s Romanization System is also used by Martha Lam and Stanley Po in their Cantonese course “Functional Cantonese”. The only difference is that diacritics are used instead of numerical superscripts. See the section on Cantonese Tones for more details.

Cantonese Initial Sounds:

Each row of the Initial Sounds table contains:

the Sidney Lau System representation of a Cantonese Initial sound,
its quick (and sometimes dirty) equivalent sound in English (for beginners),
a more accurate equivalent sound (if any) in English (for language experts),
a Cantonese example word containing that sound,
the Cantonese character for the Cantonese example word,
the meaning of the Cantonese example word.

Initial Sound	Quick English Approximation	Advanced Sound Explanation	Example Word	Example Character	Example Meaning
b	big	spy	ba¹	爸	father
ch	chat	cats	cha¹	叉	fork
d	dog	sty	da¹	打	dozen
f	fee		fa¹	花	flower
g	go	sky	ga¹	家	family
gw	Gwendoline	squeamish	gwa¹	瓜	melon
h	hat		ha¹	蝦	prawn
j	jump	matching	ja¹	揸	hold
k	kick		ka¹	卡	carriage
kw	quick		kwa¹	誇	exaggerate
l	long		la¹	啦	Final Particle
m	me		ma¹	媽	mother
n	no		na²	拏	take
ng	sing		nga⁴	牙	tooth
p	pie		pa¹	跁	lie down
s	so		sa¹	沙	sand
t	to		ta¹	他	him
w	we		wa¹	蛙	frog
y	you		ya¹	吔	cry of pain

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	Section:	Initials Finals Tones
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Sidney Lau Cantonese Romanization SystemPronunciation Guide – Initials