Both write Cantonese in the Latin alphabet. Jyutping, published by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, marks tone with a digit after the syllable. Yale, older and common in American course materials, marks tone with diacritics and an inserted h.
Neither is more correct. They were designed for different readers, and which one to learn is mostly decided by the materials you already own.
Side by side
The same words in both schemes. Every row was produced by running the word through the converter on this site, not copied from a chart:
| Characters | Jyutping | Yale | Yale with tone numbers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 香港 | hoeng1 gong2 | hēung góng | heung1 gong2 |
| 廣東話 | gwong2 dung1 waa2 | gwóng dūng wá | gwong2 dung1 wa2 |
| 你好 | nei5 hou2 | néih hóu | neih5 hou2 |
| 朋友 | pang4 jau5 | pàhng yáuh | pahng4 yauh5 |
| 唔該 | m4 goi1 | m̀h gōi | mh4 goi1 |
What actually differs
- Tone. Jyutping: a digit 1-6 after the syllable. Yale: a diacritic on the vowel, plus an h after the vowel for the three lower-register tones.
- Spelling of some initials. Jyutping writes z, c and j where Yale writes j, ch and y. 中 is zung1 in Jyutping, jūng in Yale.
- Typing. Jyutping is plain ASCII, so it types anywhere and sorts and searches predictably. Yale needs combining diacritics, which is why Yale with tone numbers exists as a compromise.
- Where you meet them. Jyutping is what Hong Kong input methods, modern dictionaries and most software use. Yale appears in older textbooks and in a number of university courses, particularly in the United States.
Which to use
Use whichever your materials use — switching schemes midway through a course costs more than it gains. If nothing is choosing for you, Jyutping is the more practical default: it types without special characters, it is what dictionaries and input methods expect, and tone numbers are easier to be sure about than a diacritic you have to squint at.
If you already read Yale comfortably, there is no reason to abandon it. Being able to convert between the two is more useful than picking a side, and the mapping is regular enough that reading one after learning the other takes an afternoon.
Note on tone numbers: Jyutping's digits and Yale-with-tone-numbers' digits are the same 1-6 system, so heung1 and hoeng1 differ in the spelling of the vowel, not the tone.
Open the tool set to Yale — switch romanization to compare Free, no account needed. Beta — check anything you rely on.Common questions
- Which one do Hong Kong people use?
- Most Hong Kong speakers do not use either in daily life; Cantonese is written in characters. Romanization is a tool for learners, dictionaries and input methods, and in those contexts Jyutping is the common one locally.
- Ever wondered what the romanization on the MTR station names is?
- That one is the Hong Kong Government romanization — Tsim Sha Tsui, Mong Kok, Kowloon. It is a convention for place names rather than a way of teaching pronunciation, and it does not mark tone at all.
- And Sidney Lau?
- A teaching scheme, unlike the one above, from the Hong Kong textbooks of the same name. You will meet it in older materials, and it marks tone with a number after the syllable. If your course uses it, there is no reason to switch.
- Can I see the same text in both?
- Yes. Romanize it once with Jyutping and once with Yale and compare the two exports; the segmentation is identical, so the only differences are the ones described above.