Quickstart

After you have downloaded and installed PyCantonese (see Download and Install), import the package pycantonese in your Python interpreter:

import pycantonese

No errors? Great! Now you’re ready to proceed.

  1. Word segmentation

pycantonese.segment("廣東話好難學？")  # Is Cantonese difficult to learn?
# ['廣東話', '好', '難學', '？']

  1. Conversion from Cantonese characters to Jyutping

pycantonese.characters_to_jyutping('香港人講廣東話')  # Hongkongers speak Cantonese
# [('香港人', 'hoeng1gong2jan4'), ('講', 'gong2'), ('廣東話', 'gwong2dung1waa2')]

  1. Finding all verbs in the HKCanCor corpus

    In this example, we search for the regular expression '^[Vv]' for all words whose part-of-speech tag begins with “v” (or “V” for morpheme tags) in the original HKCanCor annotations:

corpus = pycantonese.hkcancor() # get HKCanCor
all_verbs = corpus.search(pos='^[Vv]')
len(all_verbs)  # number of all verbs
# 29726
all_verbs[:10]  ## print 10 results
# [Token(word='去', pos='v', jyutping='heoi3', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None),
#  Token(word='去', pos='v', jyutping='heoi3', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None),
#  Token(word='旅行', pos='vn', jyutping='leoi5hang4', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None),
#  Token(word='有冇', pos='v1', jyutping='jau5mou5', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None),
#  Token(word='要', pos='vu', jyutping='jiu3', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None),
#  Token(word='有得', pos='vu', jyutping='jau5dak1', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None),
#  Token(word='冇得', pos='vu', jyutping='mou5dak1', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None),
#  Token(word='去', pos='v', jyutping='heoi3', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None),
#  Token(word='係', pos='v', jyutping='hai6', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None),
#  Token(word='係', pos='v', jyutping='hai6', mor=None, gloss=None, gra=None)]

  1. Parsing Jyutping for the onset, nucleus, coda, and tone

pycantonese.parse_jyutping('gwong2dung1waa2')  # 廣東話
# [Jyutping(onset='gw', nucleus='o', coda='ng', tone='2'),
#  Jyutping(onset='d', nucleus='u', coda='ng', tone='1'),
#  Jyutping(onset='w', nucleus='aa', coda='', tone='2')]

Looking for more functionality? Please use the documentation menu on the left.