Pimsleur followup

I finished the Pimsleur Quick and Simple Cantonese course today and have a few more thoughts. While the Quick and Simple classes appear to teach the same vocabulary, the narration is customized for the language, with an emphasis on the tones in Cantonese. This was good since Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin.

One thing I had trouble with was the ng sound in Cantonese. This shows up in words like ngo and seung (I don't know how to spell these). The ng sound comes across sounding a lot like an "m" to me. The course explained how ngo is pronounced, but with seung (meaning "would like") I thought it was seum until my teacher corrected me when she heard the CD. Unfortunately when I got to "cik nang" I couldn't tell for sure how to pronounce "nang". For all I know it is "ngan".

I had some driving to do today so I checked out the Egyptian Arabic Quick and Simple class. It started out with exactly the same dialogue, and decided I wasn't ready to go through the same course again, even in another language.