Cantonese Proficiency Level Standards


1. Scope:


This standard specifies the language proficiency levels of Cantonese learners as a second language for using Cantonese in daily life, study, work, and other fields to achieve communication. This standard applies to the study, teaching, testing, and evaluation of international Cantonese education and serves as a reference.


2. Terms and Definitions


2.1 International Cantonese Language Education

Education aimed at learners of Cantonese as a second language.


2.2 Cantonese Proficiency

The language proficiency demonstrated by learners when using Cantonese to complete a specific language communication task.


2.3 Nine Bands

The division of learners' Cantonese proficiency into nine levels, from low to high.


2.4 Three-Dimension Benchmarks

Benchmarks for measuring Cantonese proficiency based on three basic language elements: phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar.


2.5 Verbal Communication Abilities

The ability of learners to comprehensively use the five language skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translating to communicate in Cantonese on various topics in different contexts.


2.6 Topics and Tasks

The common topics and typical communication tasks that learners encounter in life, study, and work when using Cantonese, requiring the integrated use of multiple language skills during the communication process.


2.7 Quantitative Criteria

The vocabulary list will be selected based on the frequency of words, arranged from high to low frequency. The word frequency is generated by the simple segmenter simple.py, and the corpus is transcribed from dialogues in movies and TV shows.