So far, I’ve only met THREE Chinese guys who could CLEARLY UNDERSTAND both Cantonese and Mandarin and can speak both languages fluently. The rest are like, "What? What did he say?" (my friend’s translation.)
So far, I’ve only met THREE Chinese guys who could CLEARLY UNDERSTAND both Cantonese and Mandarin and can speak both languages fluently. The rest are like, "What? What did he say?" (my friend’s translation.)
I actually took a few semesters of Mandarin about 25 to 30 years ago from a professor who grew up in Hong Kong speaking Cantonese, then learned Mandarin later in life before moving to the United States to teach. I asked him about this after I expressed surprise at having severe difficulty following more than maybe every tenth word in a conversation he had with his wife in Cantonese when they gave me a ride to a social event one evening, despite my having learned Mandarin for over a year at that point. His response, after thinking for a minute, was that Mandarin basically has four inflection tones, while Cantonese has eight or nine, and while Mandarin and Cantonese share a few words, most of the words for the same things are very different. He compared it as being roughly equivalent to the difference between English and Spanish – a few words are the same or very similar (no/no, in/en, automobile/automovil), but most of the words are very different (to love/amar, road/camino, blue/azul), and Spanish has certain accent marks like the tilde (~) and acute accent mark (`) that English does not have.