I keep coming back to Mr. So's book because it has so many different speech patterns, including the three-character adjectival expressions, (hung fet fet, yau lam lam, etc.) that are so loved by the Cantonese. What was really fascinating is to see how many of these phrases have influenced neighboring languages; my girlfriend, born and raised in northern Guangxi, recognized many of them from her native Zhuang, which belongs to a different language family, despite the fact that she does not speak Cantonese.
My Hong Kong friends found some of the phrases in this book rather alien. That's no criticism, and indeed may indicate that Mr. So has culled words from across the Cantonese-speaking diaspora. Maybe he just interviewed a lot of elderly speakers. It's a shame he does not say more about his own linguistic experiences or how he put the book together. My Cantonese teacher, a Hong Kong native, commented that some of the words I learned sounded "very Guangzhou." If Mr. So decides to produce a revised edition, I hope he could better distinguish what phrases are unique to specific regions of Guangdong. After all, even Cantonese has plenty of dialects that are barely intelligible to Shenzhen or Hong Kong natives.
All in all, this book is a must-have for anyone serious about learning Cantonese. It will certainly help purge your speech of sterile Mandarin speech patterns. I bought it two years ago and still review it frequently.
