The Problem With Cantonese: It's Not Mandarin

I've been slogging through Cantonese lessons for about four weeks now, and learning this language is proving to be one of the greatest academic challenges of my life. I've heard that studying languages gives your brain a good workout, and judging by how drained I feel after each lesson, I well believe it. I've actually been longing to conjugate French verbs again, as that task seems downright pleasant compared to my initiation into Cantonese.

I knew going in that learning it would be a huge task, as it's so different from English and every other language I've studied (Spanish, Korean, and French). As noted in a previous post, Cantonese is a tonal language. Thus, using the wrong tone can communicate something totally unrelated to what you intended to say, with comic or possibly offensive results. And there's no alphabet, so learning to read and write at even an elementary level means memorizing hundreds of characters and combinations of characters.

But to me, the real problem with learning Cantonese is that it's not Mandarin. That sounds funny, but it's the only way I can describe it. Since Mandarin is the official language of mainland China, the People's Government has done a very good job of standardizing it. Both the spoken and written forms have been standardized, as well as their romanization, and together these standards are widely accepted around the world. So, once you've mastered the tones (no small accomplishment, to be sure), there are hundreds of books and other materials available that can supplement your learning.

Cantonese, however, is anything but standardized:

1. There's no consensus on the the number of tones needed to be conversational. Everyone agrees that the full version of the language has nine tones. I'm learning six, but my teacher says you can get by with three.
2. There is no standard method of romanization. There seem to be a couple of favored ones, but there are lots of others and they don't really play well together. For example, if you use a textbook from Author A and want to also use flash cards from Author B, you'll often find that they use very different romanization systems. I discovered that the method favored by my teacher is actually used to teach Japanese speakers, so nothing is compatible with my system.
3. Cantonese uses the full traditional characters, while Mandarin uses simplified characters. It's quite difficult to find study materials that teach full characters, let alone anything that can be called standardized.
4. Grammar is a pretty loose thing in all Chinese languages, which I suppose is a blessing. This also means, however, that there are no comprehensive explanations of grammar and sentence structure.

I suppose I should quit trying to study Cantonese like I used to study French, where, in addition to my textbook, I used an array of flash cards, grammar books, dictionaries, and a bilingual reader. I also had two entire books devoted to nothing but verb conjugations and usage. I am slowly understanding something that my teacher has told me many times, that Cantonese is an oral language, and so my preferred method -- using books and writing -- is not helping a lot in this case. I am terrible at two skills that would be really good for Cantonese: learning through listening, and brute force memorization.

Well, here is one thing that I am good at, thanks to my teacher and his method: the tones. I am now able to reproduce all six tones well enough to have my teacher declare me his best student in that regard. But in other areas, like memorizing vocabulary? He hesitates diplomatically before I jump in to say that I know I need to do more work.