About Safele.com Cantonese Search

Typing Cantonese

If you can read and write Cantonese, you’ll love our Cantonese search engine! It’s actually a front-end to Google® that lets you easily type Cantonese characters, but it works just as well when searching in English or any other language for that matter.

It allows you to enter Cantonese characters by typing only the first letter of the character’s Romanization (in the Sidney Lau system), then clicking on the desired displayed Cantonese character with the mouse. If you’re typing English or some other language, just keep typing and ignore the Chinese character suggestions.

Note that you don’t need to type tones. You only need to type the first letter of the Romanization for a character, then use the mouse to click the desired character!

Example:  To search for 香港酒店 (i.e. Hong Kong hotels), you would simply:
      type h, then click 香,
      then type g, then click 港,
      then type j, then click 酒,
      then type d, then click 店,
      then press Enter.

In fact, 港 is listed as a suggested character after you click 香, and 店 is listed as a suggested character after you click 酒, so in some cases after clicking the first Chinese character, you can then click on a suggested character, so it’s even faster than having to type everything using the keyboard.

This entry system has been deliberately designed to use only the first letter of the Romanization so that people don’t need to learn an entire Romanization system in order to use it. You only need to learn the initial letter! It’s especially useful for Hong Kong and Macau people who’ve never learnt a Romanization for Cantonese.

It uses Sidney Lau’s Romanization system, but for those who know the Yale Romanization system, I think you’ll find that it’s identical because only the first letter of the Romanization needs to be typed. That’s the beauty of it!

For example, 香港酒店 is heung¹ gong² jau² dim³ in the Sydney Lau system, and it’s hēunggóng jáudim in the Yale system, but either way, the initial letters are the same! ... h g j d.

Oh yeah, and Safele also warns you about software on your computer which is out-of-date. You should update old software on a monthly basis to dramatically lower the risk of getting a virus or trojan on your computer!!!

If you find any missing characters or find some bugs, please contact us using the Contact Us link below.

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