Mobile assisted language learning: Conversion from Mandarin to Cantonese

Cantonese as a spoken variety of Chinese Language is widely adopted in not only the Cantonese speaking region in China, but also other Chinese communities in the world, with an estimated population of 72 million of native speakers in different countries. 90% of the population in Hong Kong adopt it as first language. Cantonese is inevitable for daily life purpose in Hong Kong. A mobile assisted language learning tool applying the concept of conversion from Mandarin to Cantonese apply the corresponding is developed by a famous native mobile application development framework, React Native is developed in this project. On one hand it can assist Mandarin speaks to learn Cantonese, on the other hand it can help promoting the Cantonese language and culture to the whole Chinese community with Mandarin’s statue of lingua franca. Experiments is carried out to evaluate the learning effectiveness of the mobile application comparing to the traditional method and the result shows that the mobile application achieve a similar effect as the traditional method. The result of the follow up interview evaluating learner’s attitude towards the experience of using the tool to learn Cantonese shows that generally the learners satisfy the overall experience, however, their attitude and confidence towards mobile assisted language learning is just average.