The best AI apps to practice speaking Cantonese

What you need to practice speaking Cantonese

Cantonese is hard. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the second hardest for English speakers, right after Japanese (9,274 effort points).

And it needs things most apps were never built for.

• The Cantonese people actually speakWritten Chinese is basically Mandarin. So a lot of tools write 是 and 我們, where someone in Hong Kong says 係 and 我哋. If you want to speak, you want the spoken language.
• A romanization you can readJyutping writes every syllable in Latin letters, with a tone number from 1 to 6: 你好 is nei5 hou2. You want it above the characters, on word cards and on flashcards, until you don’t need it anymore.
• Tones you can hearJyutping counts six tones, and a different tone is a different word. The quickest fix: say your sentence, then hear a native speaker say the same one.
• A bridge to MandarinMost of the Chinese around you is Mandarin. When you see how a Cantonese word relates to the Mandarin one, and where it comes from, it sticks. If you already speak some Mandarin, it’s a shortcut.
• Lots of Cantonese you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: videos and texts in spoken Cantonese where you already understand most of it. That takes some looking, because most written Chinese is Mandarin.
• Lots of speaking timeA language this hard takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Cantonese. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch YouTube videos with Cantonese subtitles, and read stories in spoken Hong Kong Cantonese at your level, with Jyutping above every word. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itUnderstanding a word isn’t the same as using it, with the right one of six tones. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to Cantonese? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the basics with a course like Pimsleur, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Cantonese

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies with Jyutping above every word, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

Every word linked to Mandarin

This one is special. Tap any word and its card tells you where the word comes from, and what a Mandarin speaker says instead, with the pinyin. We haven’t seen this in any other app.

Cantonese often keeps the old word that Classical Chinese used, where Mandarin moved on. Once you see that, a lot of “strange” Cantonese words suddenly make sense.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Cantonese teachers

Two teachers, both from Hong Kong. Kelvin is from Kowloon, Michelle from Sha Tin. They speak the casual Cantonese you’d hear there.

• 
  Kelvin Chan

  Kowloon · Chinese
• 
  Michelle Wong

  Sha Tin · Chinese

Input: Cantonese to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Cantonese you hear and read, where you already understand most of it. And that’s the tricky part, because most of what’s written in Chinese is Mandarin.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now, both in spoken Cantonese, with Jyutping above every word. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Your own YouTube videosPaste a link to a YouTube video with Cantonese subtitles, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with, Jyutping above every word, new words in yellow. The video needs its own Cantonese subtitles: speech-to-text still writes Cantonese as Mandarin.
• Stories written for youRead writes texts in spoken Hong Kong Cantonese, at your level, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Cantonese word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. Cantonese has no spaces, so it cuts the text into words first. Then it checks every word against your list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Duolingo does teach Cantonese, but only to people who already speak Mandarin. It’s listed under courses for Chinese (Simplified) speakers, not for English speakers. Here’s how the two compare, from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending