fearedbliss

Hello all, I'm happy to announce my new edition of The Cantonese Scrolls. There have been many foundation updates to this and now all of the encounters in all 30 quests (5 acts) have been completely re-written. You will also find my resurrected "Cantodex" at the back of the game/book. I hope everyone enjoys it. Take care and stay safe!

More detailed information of the release can be found here:

https://themovingcaravan.com/threads/the-cantonese-scrolls-2...

Hey all, I posted this a few years ago (2023) when I initially released it. Now that the Windows 10 EOL is almost here (Next month 10/14/25), I've decided to re-post to raise visibility again. My strategy has been working flawlessly for all of these years and I don't foresee any issues moving forward. I hope this helps some people out there. Stay safe!

I definitely read that as "gam3 do1". I never heard "doe1" for this character, there is always something more to learn ;).

I'm happy to hear that both can be used, normally I always have heard more of the "e" shift in a relatively consistent way. I normally say "大減價" for a big sale, but I understand your point was more about showing a demonstration where the "i" may be used. Although I would say that it really depends on the speaker and how they feel. I would most likely use the "e" shift consistently and be perfectly understood.

Not necessarily, the way I see it you can just jump in and start learning and practicing. Now is there a correct way to write the strokes, technically yes there is (which fun fact, Chinese writing is designed for right handed people. My wife is a native speaker from Hong Kong but she's a lefty, so she adjusted all stroke writing from the left handed perspective ;D), however, I would say writing the strokes properly when the goal is to learn how to read/speak/hear Cantonese is the main goal is alright. Will you have to unlearn bad habits or re-train yourself to write the strokes properly? Yes, this may be a possibility. Of course you could just research how to write the strokes from the beginning.

The Cantonese Scrolls is a project to document and teach the language, and record the characters for its direct written form. It doesn't contain every single aspect or tool for language learning, but the core material to preserve the language, let's say 250 years later when someone unearths it. This is also why I called it a scroll, since I view it as a sort of digital ancient document written on parchment paper haha.

Thank you for the corrections, I definitely agree that while I've learned a lot of Cantonese in the past 11 years, I still have a long way to go and loving the process. Given that Cantonese is my third language (I've studied a bunch of other languages, but Cantonese is third language I'm actually specializing in for personal reasons), it makes sense that it sounds unnatural, at least for now. For a portion of it I do agree with the other commenter that it is a stylistic choice. The % part is just me using what's already popular in Cantonese speaking which is to use the "pou-cent" type of style rather than the more traditional way. You are right regarding 學院, my school advertises itself in this way hence my usage of it ;D. But overall, you got what I was trying to say which is the most important part of the process, I'll continue to improve over time :).

Cantonese has no:

- Standard

- Country that speaks it (only Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, and the Overseas Diaspora speak it).

- Learners of the language are primarily within the above territories and learn it through exposure, not through actual proper education in Cantonese itself. But rather learn Standard Chinese writing in school, and just "auto-translate" to Cantonese in their mind. I would even say most Cantonese people don't know how to write Cantonese given the "defaulting to Standard Chinese". A lot of the times when I ask a Cantonese speaker how to write something in Cantonese, they don't know. This is due to many reasons which I won't elaborate atm in order to not make this post longer than what it already is. While this is good in "getting away with being able to write Chinese and communicate with the broader Chinese speaking world", it is not good for Cantonese itself. This is why we have so many words in Cantonese that don't even have a character. It also explains why eventually people did want to create more and more characters and luckily we were at least able to get the Hong Kong Supplementary Set standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Supplementary_Charac...

There has never been a point in Chinese history where the Chinese government has had this much power, and we already have plenty of evidence that they suppress and would like to eliminate the language from existence, and create their own view of what a "Chinese Person" and "Chinese Identity" is. Furthermore, we've already lost and mostly lost a lot of other Chinese languages. Hakka being one of them. It would be extremely difficult to find a Hakka speaker and Hakka learning resources at this point in time.

My time line for when Cantonese will die is far into the future, outside of my life time. But I would put it within the next 300-500 years or lower. Given this context, it is better to start the preservation and education efforts as early as possible.

I'm not expecting you to agree with me, but I wanted to give you some context. I'm not alone in my views.

Hey @dbtc, I did think about doing this but originally decided to try and find another solution. Reason being that atm my current directory structure is nested (with a variable length of nesting), and I also wanted to be able to use the audio files from anywhere in the app, which means outside of the dungeons directory. But you bringing it up again makes me think if I'm realistically going to be using them outside of the dungeons either way. Also, even if the main folder containing the audio files is called something else, as long as I have a flatter directory structure, I can make it work. I'll consider a flatter more predicable approach since having the audio files for each word is much more beneficial than not.

Thank you!

Definitely. I'm not saying the word 申請 itself isn't used in normal speech, but more that the pronunciation of 請 in normal speech would sound more like an e. So I would rather teach people the normal way people would pronounce words and not the literary form, since as I said before, I also do want to stay away from Standard Chinese as much as possible and teach Written Cantonese. It will take me some time to continue to extract the essence of the language and document it at the core level. Once I've extracted the language it could (and should) be used to create full literary writings in Written Cantonese, and not need to use nor ever learn Standard Chinese. If my target audience is to speak to Cantonese people specifically and not every single person of any Chinese language in existence, then writing in Written Cantonese is enough for my purposes and goals.

I definitely appreciate the feedback :). Thank you!

Good question. I have actually and was recently playing around with that. The problem isn't necessarily the recordings (since I've accepted that I'm willing to record all the possible Cantonese sounds for all the words myself - I'm not a fan of AI and I don't use it in my personal life if I can avoid it), but more because of the nature of the project. I haven't figured out a way to be able to get the base directory of the site so that I can load all of the audio files from a specific directory, specially when being used in offline mode. If I was only running this project from a webserver, it's easy to get the website root and just append the audio location, but if you download the project for offline use, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to access the base dir from the file:// protocol perspective. I have some ideas but I'll need to experiment with that over time. As a stop gap measure I've added the "Core Audio Reference" page which is my recordings of all of the tones, initials, and finals. But it's still not the best experience.

Once I figure out the base dir thing I'll be able to easily just make every automatic romanization that you see an a href which points to the mp3.

I'm aware of this and I've made a conscious decision to use the lazy pronunciation. I'm actually thinking of switching to lazy pronunciation as the standard pronunciation for a lot of words, the same as what some authors have done. It's more difficult and weird to teach people a pronunciation that not many people are using. At this point the lazy pronunciation has pretty much dominated the normal language development.

我都打詠春。喺學院，我師傅同埋我哋都話"lim". 如果你話"nim"會係好奇怪。我推介你試吓明粵卷唔使係一百%啱。如果係八十到九十%啱同大部分人明你講乜嘢，我覺得OK。學生可以繼續學廣東話。越來越好。

Thank you :). Definitely feel free to use, download and share 粵卷 for your learning. I'll be continuing to make improvements to it over time. This is a life long project of mine so expect more improvements as my Cantonese develops.

Thank you :).

Thank you :).

Thank you :).

哈哈。嗰個AI覺得廣東話同國語一樣.

-.-

Thanks for the suggestion. Take a look at my other reply above, but The Cantonese Scrolls is a project that needs to be able to run offline, directly in your web browser, with no network calls. I allow everyone to download the entire project and self study offline or self host it if they want. This serves as both a backup mechanism, and a defense mechanism against any potential government censorship by countries that don't want Cantonese to exist.

It won't die as long as we keep using it. Use it or lose it pretty much. I do think there are a lot of people that might want to learn Canto but since it doesn't have any official standardization and there being an active push by greater forces to suppress it, it would be difficult for anyone outside of Hong Kong to learn it. This is where my 粵卷 comes in. I want to continue improving and refining my teaching strategy over the years and create a standard that people can use to learn the language.

The Cantonese Scrolls is designed to run directly in your web browser (thus cross platform), portable (in that it's conveniently located anywhere you have a computer - small mobile phone, or a desktop), so you can study on the train, but most importantly it's designed to be offline and downloadable. I want the 粵卷 to be a Cantonese learning resource that is freely available for anyone in the world that view/download it, for anyone that has the desire to learn, and for it to outlive me. I do see this being a life long project so I hope I can continue improving this project over the course of my life.

Haha. As described in the title of the game, it's a Mental RPG. The game takes place in your mind. The site only gives you the environment for you to simulate in your mind. Think about Dungeons and Dragons "Theater of the Mind" but for language learning. Every encounter with a word is a battle. You defeat the enemy once you understand it. It's honor system based given that only you would know if you actually understand it.

Thanks for that! Yup I'm well aware of the differences between literary and casual (and of course the differences between Standard Chinese and Written Cantonese). My goal for this project is to help preserve and teach the Cantonese language based on my understanding (which is still improving), but more importantly teaching it as a completely independent language because that's what it is. In this instance Standard Chinese or any sort of literary pronunciation is essentially useless to me since people aren't speaking that way, and I also am a strong believer of writing the way you speak. Mandarin speakers also used to have this problem until the mid 1800s when the transition from 古文 to 白話 took place, and standardized on Beijing dialect.

And you are definitely right about 懶音. They are both explained in the same section not because they are the same thing but because they are both modifications occuring for the sound pronunciations.

Not that I'm aware of. I believe I'm the first person to frame (and in a way "open source") a language program in this type of way. My perspective is a mixture of a lot of different things including my love for Diablo 1 (and its minimalism and simplicity) and 2 (Original, not Resurrected).

Yup it was a combination of factors, but nothing legal related, Blizzard didn’t reach out. It was easier for me to maintain and provide a better experience by just hosting the main file archive itself on my server directly since all of the binaries live there anyways. I use GitHub primarily as a markdown rendering frontend for the project. Of course the Cactus Core itself is publicly available and the source code can be found at the https://github.com/fearedbliss/Cactus-Core page.

Edit: By “llama” I’m guessing you mean Alpaca (my simple stash extension based on PlugY 11.02)?

Sometimes the name an author gives to a project doesn't need to be related to the thing itself, but can be a name inspired by other life factors. In this case I decided to call it Cactus.

Lol you are funny. I'm having fun reading everyone's comments on the theory of how the name came to be.

Cactus and Diablo I / II were exclusively made for Windows (even though I use FreeBSD as my primary OS, and used to be a Gentoo Linux developer). Thus I wanted full and seamless integration with the OS that the game was originally made for. Since Diablo II can run on UNIX-like systems through Wine (fairly well - at least for the Vanilla game, not too sure how mods would interact given specific uses of OS behavior, hard to say without actually testing every single mod made), and also because all of the Cactus platforms are self contained and independent (even independent from Cactus itself), it would be easy for someone to implement a Cactus like type of system on UNIX-like systems. You would just need to do the same file switching that Cactus does, and update the "registry" which would actually be located in a WINEPREFIX. I will leave that exercise for someone else since I'm just interested in maintaining Cactus on Windows 7 and Windows 10 exclusively.

Definitely. I've been on the Dark Island for about 6-12 months now and been loving it. You definitely need to be more conscious of the apps you use and all of that (Which I already have been for like a decade at this point through the use of Linux and FreeBSD, and using more open source apps - although I still use proprietary stuff if necessary). But once you are conscious about the apps, then going offline is not as difficult. You'll know what apps you can and can't live without, what apps work without internet or not, and workarounds that can be used with certain applications. You'll also know what offline installers and other setups you'll need to back up. For example, since I've gone dark, but I still want to continue working on Cactus even after Windows 10's EOL, I've downloaded the entire Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition archive, and can install everything completely in an offline environment.

It would work for lan gaming since you are within your network, but not for Steam since Steam essentially is a form of DRM and you'll need to "check in" eventually. I know Steamworks is their actual DRM library and that developers can decide if they want to use it or not, but Steam essentially made DRM flourish in the industry. As much as I love Valve and the games they've made early on, they definitely have hurt the industry in this respect.

I love the original Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 and I don't want to work on newer stuff. It's like saying "Why you still playing Chess? That game is like 1500 years old". Sometimes you need to do what you love, it doesn't matter what other people think or do. Enjoy your own life and do what you like. Simple as that.

You definitely should continue to use Windows 7 (for games in an offline capacity). Nothing wrong with that and it's exactly what you should be doing for gaming with old games. I legally own Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 10 Pro, and use both of them for playing my old (and wonderful) collection of games. It's the same thing you would do either with just owning a Gameboy/N64/PS1/PS2, etc, or for the desktop case, trying to emulate old hardware on X platform. The former here is more applicable than the latter of course, but both are perfectly valid when speaking about systems used in an offline capacity.

I added the following to the latest Cactus documentation updates:

- Added sources links related to Microsoft requiring online activation during Windows 11's OOBE stage to the "Windows 11+ will not be supported" section of the Cactus documentation. I will not accept the premise that I need to use a Microsoft Account, or require online activation at the OOBE stage, for me to use my own computer, and I definitely won't accept the use of "workarounds" to bypass that requirement as a justification to use that OS. That requirement should not be there in the first place. This is the same thing Microsoft already forces people to do on the Xbox One. When you first buy the console, one of the first things you need to do is log into their servers. Your console is useless until you do that. That's unacceptable. I'm not surprised they are moving in that direction with Windows in general, and I'm not accepting it.

  - Source 1 - February 16, 2022 - Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22557 - https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2022/02/16/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-22557/

 ```
 Similar to Windows 11 Home edition, Windows 11 Pro edition now requires internet connectivity during the initial device setup (OOBE) only. If you choose to setup device for personal use, MSA will be required for setup as well. You can expect Microsoft Account to be required in subsequent WIP flights.
 ```

  - Source 2 - May 5, 2022 - Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22616 - https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2022/05/05/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-22616/

 ```
 Previously, we shared new requirements for internet and MSA on the Windows 11 Pro edition. Today, Windows Insiders on Windows 11 Pro edition will now require MSA and internet connectivity during the initial device setup (OOBE) only when setting up for personal use. If you choose to setup device for Work or School, there is no change, and it will work the same way as before.

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