I make a Cantonese dictionary app for Windows/Mac/Linux, similar to Pleco (has multiple sources, coloured characters for tones, etc)!

https://jyutdictionary.com/

awesome, just sent an email about potentially sponsoring this.

consolidating other resource links from the thread:

* jyutpin typing game https://chaaklau.github.io/cantorocks/

Do you mind sharing why are you learning cantonese?

our family grew up with cantonese as the second language. my mom is from hong kong and my dad from the southern part of china.

unfortunately, i failed to cherish this opportunity and spoke english predominantly as a child, leaving me with heavily-accented and vocabulary-limited cantonese.

i have spent an inordinate amount of time repairing these deficiencies and learning mandarin as well.

a little more self-awareness and foresight as a teenager could have saved me years of learning as an adult.

on the upside, self-learning has yielded insights into chinese language and culture, learning, and accents. unsure if these other perspectives are worth the extra time and effort, though. :)

What I'm after is a resource for learning mandarin of you're already a speaker of Cantonese.

I've found it surprisingly hard to find a summary of the differences.

By contrast learning German from Danish seemed to have some bits that made it clear reasonably fast.

If you can read hanzi, can't you just start reading whatever you want in Mandarin? Obviously starting with something easy and then moving on to harder and harder texts, of course.

And can't you just start watching TV shows and movies in Mandarin? It should be a lot easier than for us mortals who start out without knowing any Sinitic languages. We have to work hard just to handle the tones and the near total lack of shared vocabulary.

I am puzzled that learning Mandarin for you hasn't gone much the same way as learning German did.

There is of course the standard way of playing with HelloChinese (or similar apps) and LingQ/Du Chinese (or similar apps) + reading easy readers (Mandarin Companion, Chinese Breeze, and similar). You should be able to speedrun them, compared to the long slog path that we mortals have to take.

(A fellow Dane with zero East Asian parentage.)

Yeah I'm more looking for shortcuts. With German it was really just a matter of seeing a bit of it, and then boom I could read the newspaper with no problem.

Cantonese and Mandarin weirdly seem to have wandered further from each other than Danish and German. At least for me, but that may also be lack of exposure.

I'm not affiliated nor do I personally have any experience with this service, but have heard good things about the Canto To Mando Blueprint: https://www.thecmblueprint.com/