i want to learn chinese, what're the differences between cantonese and mandarin?
Sunday, February 20th, 2011 at
7:58 pm
i’m going to be a freshman in college next fall, and will be majoring in international business. i want to couple it with a foreign langauge (preferably chinese) but am unsure as to whether or not i should be cantonese or mandarin. what are the differences? if i learn one, will it be easy to learn the other? keep in mind i want the language for business purposes when i’m out of college.
Tagged with: business purposes • cantonese • freshman • international business • langauge • mandarin
Filed under: Learn to Speak Mandarin
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_(linguistics)
Mandarin —(Traditional: 北方話, Simplified: 北方话, Hanyu Pinyin: Běifānghuà, lit. "Northern speech" OR 北方方言 Hanyu Pinyin: Běifāng Fāngyán, lit. "Northern dialects"), is a category of Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The term "Mandarin" can also refer to Standard Mandarin, which is based on the Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin is the official spoken language of the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and one of the official spoken languages of Singapore. When taken as an independent language, as is often done in academic literature, Mandarin has more speakers than any other language.
"Mandarin" usually refers to only standard Mandarin in everyday usage. The broad academic concept of "Mandarin" encompasses a large number of linguistically related dialects, some less mutually intelligible than others, and is very rarely used outside of academic circles as a self-description. Instead, when asked to describe the spoken form they are using, Chinese speaking a form of Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Sichuan dialect or Northeast China dialect, and may not recognize that it is in fact classified by linguists as a form of "Mandarin". Nor is there a common "Mandarin" identity based on language, though there are strong regional identities centered around individual Mandarin dialects.
Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Mandarin is a language or a dialect. Please see here for the issues surrounding this dispute.
They are two different languages! But you should learn Mandarin if you will chose but one, for it is the more influential dialect!
天不怕，地不怕，只怕廣東人說普通話！
mandarin.
90% people speak mandarin in china.And the cantonese speaker also know mandarin.cantonese is speaking mainly by HongKong and Guangdong province. The two have same character but different pronounce. If you can speak mandarin.then cantonese is not hard for you.
mandarin is much simpler than cantonese, and more widely spoken–pretty much everyone that you would ever do business with in china, taiwan and even hong kong can speak some mandarin. cantonese has 9 tones, while mandarin has only 4, and cantonese has a broader range of sounds, including words that end in ‘hard’ consonants like k, t, p (the Hong Kong airport Chek Lap Kok could not be called this is mandarin–mandarin words can not end in -k or -p)
however, the "business savvy" chinese, not only in china (guangdong & hong kong) but elsewhere like in malaysia & singapore, speak cantonese. li ka-shing and all of the other rich chinese entrepreneurs and tycoons you’ve read about are cantonese speakers.
i’d still bet on mandarin, though, because even the cantonese speakers are learning mandarin now, and they’ll learn it faster/better than any of us english-speakers will.
If you aim to study Chinese in college it probably won’t matter what you want to learn because most colleges in North America (if not all of them) only offer Mandarin Chinese, as that is the official language of mainland China and Taiwan.
All Chinese dialects (whether Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, etc) use the same writing system — the Chinese characters you’re probably familiar with — but there is no alphabet (each character represents a word), hence many local dialects have developed which pronounce the same character in entirely different ways.
Cantonese is not spoken by that many people in China. As previously mentioned, it’s mainly spoken in Hong Kong and the Guangdong province. It has a fairly high profile in North America because many Chinese immigrants here are from Cantonese-speaking provinces, and due to the influence of Hong Kong pop music and movies (e.g. Bruce Lee, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh, and Jackie Chan were all movie stars in Hong Kong before breaking into Hollywood).
So, Mandarin will probably be your language of choice, although it may not be necessary. English is the language of international business and pretty much every Asian and European country requires their students to study it for several years. Chances are any Chinese business people you deal with in the future will know English as well if not better than you know Chinese. On the other hand, it certainly couldn’t hurt to learn their language (if only to make sure they’re not talking smack behind your back, haha).