I first started listening to Cantonese advanced podcasts, because I thought that since I wanted to listen to the sound of the language and get used to its flow first, any spoken Cantonese would do. It turned out that the knowledge of Mandarin and Classical Chinese would be way too helpful in order to just learn Cantonese as a completely new language and so I switched to newbie and elementary lessons, where I could get into some structure as well.
I did not try to find out how many tones there were in Cantonese or what their description was. It was really relaxing to say the least. No stress from trying to reproduce the tonal curve I saw in the book, no stress from trying to “mimic a picture”, no stress from trying to reproduce the correct sound pitch and so on. I also didn't have to subconsciously solve problems like: Is the tone high enough? Doesn't it sound strange when I say it like this? How many tones are below this tone I just said? Is this tone different enough from that other tone starting at the same pitch? So many questions every student has to face just trying to produce a simple “Hello” in Cantonese, when he or she learns the tones through descriptions. Now what I mean by feeling no stress is that of course no one is expecting me to get the pronunciation right the first time and naturally I will do mistakes, but the point I'm trying to make is that this way I have much less stress when it comes to the number of things I have to worry about while trying to say one or two simple words. The main difference is that I am concentrating only on the sound.
