Master Cantonese with a little application... on your phone

For most foreigners learning Chinese, the biggest struggle is finding the right tones when presented with romanised script. Dean Head, the creator of Fonetic Cantonese, says this is because 'the tongue is a muscle. Since English does not require the tongue to contort to different shapes to make those tones and sounds, our muscles find it difficult to make the necessary movement required to produce those sounds.'

Head confronted this problem by creating an app that provides audio cues to the most commonly used words he came across when he was learning Cantonese. Smartphone technology was not developed when he first came up with the idea. He had initially written the book Fonetic Cantonese using the international phonetics system, which foreigners would be more familiar with. When the iPhone arrived, he found a local to help with audio pronunciations and made it available as an app.

Words and phrases are presented in English, in alphabetical order, and are indexed so that searching any keyword will find all phrases containing that word. This makes the app simple and straightforward to use and an indispensable pocket reference for the traveller or Cantonese beginner.

Hanna Torneus, an IT manager from Sweden, uses Fonetic Cantonese to look up words so she can listen to the audio and repeat it for practice. 'Just looking at the phonetics doesn't make much sense to me and I wouldn't dare speak up using the phonetics because I'm not a native English speaker. But, when I hear it on the phone, I'm sure of how to say it now.'

Benny Lewis, polyglot and author of The Language Hacking Guide, says one of the most daunting problems for language learners is remembering words. The most helpful way to recall them, therefore, is to give them context and association. 'Take the word you need to remember and make an imaginative association with its translation,' he says.

Chinagram is an app that helps users remember difficult Chinese characters by providing vivid image associations. It tells the story of Chinese writing and the logic behind radicals (or roots) that make up characters. For example, the root for father, is associated with a pair of hammers - the tools of a man's trade. The addition of the phonogram tells us how we should pronounce (father).