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Cantonese phrases, by meaning
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Common questions about Cantonese
What's covered on this Cantonese page?
Nineteen functional categories with Cantonese examples: aspect (咗 for completion, 緊 for ongoing, 過 for experiential, 住 for durative), modality (識/可以 for can, 要 for must, 想 for want), negation (唔 for general, 冇 for don't-have), questions (the A-not-A pattern, content questions with 邊個/乜嘢/邊度/幾時/點解/點), the topic-comment pattern, sentence-final particles, and 14 others. Glossed in jyutping.
Why does almost every Cantonese sentence end with a particle?
Because sentence-final particles carry the speaker's stance — surprise, certainty, softening, doubt, hearsay — that English would convey through tone of voice. 喎 marks something noteworthy or contrary to expectation, 啦 softens or emphasizes, 咋 minimizes ('only that'), 嘅 makes a statement-of-fact, 㗎 emphasizes commitment. Stripping them out makes Cantonese sound oddly flat. Phrases on this page show how each particle reshapes the same proposition.
How do six tones actually work in Cantonese?
Cantonese distinguishes high-level (1), high-rising (2), mid-level (3), low-falling (4), low-rising (5), low-level (6). Some analyses also count three checked tones on entering-tone syllables. The same syllable on different tones is a different word: si¹ 'poem', si² 'history', si³ 'try', si⁴ 'time', si⁵ 'market', si⁶ 'matter'. Jyutping romanization on the page marks tone with a number after every syllable so the contrast stays visible.
How does Cantonese mark time without verb tenses?
Through aspect particles plus context. 食 means 'eat' / 'ate' / 'will eat' depending on what surrounds it. Add 咗 (sik6 zo2) and you get completion ('ate'); add 緊 and you get the progressive ('is eating'); add 過 and you get experiential ('have eaten before'). Time-of-day words (尋日, 今日, 聽日) carry most of the temporal load.
Is this Hong Kong Cantonese or Guangzhou Cantonese?
Largely Hong Kong / Guangdong urban Cantonese — the prestige variety used in Hong Kong media, Cantopop, and films, and largely shared with Guangzhou speech. Other regional Cantonese varieties (Toishanese, Hoisanese) differ in pronunciation and some lexicon. The structures shown here are the broadly understood urban standard, written in traditional characters with jyutping.
Sources for Cantonese
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Matthews, Stephen & Yip, Virginia (2011). Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar, 2nd ed. Routledge (542 pp.). — THE definitive reference grammar; cross-referenced as "CRG" throughout Alderete et al. 2017. [via static/grammar-library/yue/matthews-yip-2011-cantonese-grammar.pdf]