Yale
[Cantonese]

[Description from Wikipedia]

The Yale romanization system was developed by Yale University in the 1950s and 60s as an aid to teaching Mandarin and Cantonese to American military personnel. It then spread through the U.S. and became popular in Taiwan as a method of teaching Chinese to foreigners. Today it used mainly for romanizing Cantonese, though it does appear in some Mandarin dictionaries and textbooks.

Native speakers of Mandarin often claim that other dialects don’t have their own writing system. However, Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a widely used written standard. There are two standard forms used in writing Cantonese: formal written Cantonese and colloquial written Cantonese. Formal written Cantonese is very similar to written Mandarin and can be read by a Mandarin speaker without much difficulty. However, formal written Cantonese is rather different from spoken Cantonese. Colloquial written Cantonese is more similar to spoken Cantonese but is largely unreadable by an untrained Mandarin speaker.

Yale is still widely used in books and dictionaries for Cantonese. Developed by Parker Po-fei Huang and Gerald P. Kok, it shares some similarities with hànyŭ pīnyīn in that unvoiced, unaspirated consonants are represented by letters traditionally used in English and other European languages to represent voiced sounds. For example, IPA /p/ is represented as b in Yale, whereas its aspirated counterpart, /p h/ is represented as p. Because of this and other factors, Yale romanization is usually held to be easy for American English speakers to pronounce without much training.

Cantonese specific romanization is important because the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese are great: Mandarin has 4 tones, Cantonese has 6…7…8…9; Cantonese features a number of sounds that don’t exist in Mandarin, particularly vowels and finals; the converse is also true, some sounds in Mandarin don’t exist in Cantonese, for example x and sh.

Hànyŭ Pīnyīn

Tongyong Pinyin

Wade-Giles

BoPoMoFo

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