What are the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese? How did they arise? Can a Cantonese speaker understand a Mandarin speaker mostly, somewhat, or not at all?
My wife is Chinese/Hong Kong. She speaks Cantonese, and understands very little Mandarin.
According to her, there is a “snob factor” when it comes to speaking Cantonese or Mandarin. Basically, Chinese who speak Mandarin consider those who speak Cantonese “hillbillies,” more-or-less.
The written language is the same, but the pronunciation is completely different. Mandarin has 4 tones, and Cantonese (IIRC) has 9. Asking how each arose is basically asking how any language arose - way back when the languages developed, China wasn’t a unified nation, essentially. Unless bilingual, the speaker of one language would not understand the other at all. These are just two of the many tongues spoken in China, and the situation is even worse in India (the written script is different amongst the different dialects there).
What we call Chinese is actually a set of different but closely related languages (not just dialects, but languages which are unintelligible to each other). According to Ethnologue ( which you can find at http://www.ethnologue.com/home.asp ), there are thirteen different Chinese languages (and these can each be further broken down into several dialects). There are also several more distantly related languages spoken in China and a number of unrelated languages spoken there too.
Actually, Philistine, it’s not necessary for a territory to be broken up politically for languages to become differentiated. Furthermore, the difference between the writing systems actually has little to do with how many languages there are in an area. There are many unrelated languages with the same writing system, and there are cases where one language is written in several different writing systems.
To answer the OP, Mandarin and Cantonese use different tones and pronunciations. It is not like the difference between say Portuguese and Spanish (although I speak neither of these), but more like English and Spanish or English and French.
Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually incomprehensible. Now, a Mandarin speaker will have an easier time of learning Cantonese than a monolinguist English speaker.
Philistine, actually the written language differs as well. Forget the simplified/long form character differences, which can be substantial. Try reading a newspaper from Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore and Beijing. Native speakers have serious difficulty.
Nowadays, Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong are exposed to a lot more mandarin in school and media, so the honkies understand and speak a lot more Mandarin than was the case even 10 years ago.
Those who are native Mandarin speakers in mainland China, rarely speak or understand another dialect. Dialect speakers usually speak their native dialect and can understand Mandarin, if not speak it. Up until recently, radio, TV and movies were all in Mandarin and never in dialect. Now, there is are dedicated TV channels in different dialects. Many of the dialect speakers, especially in the big cities, grow up bilingually in the dialect and Mandarin.
Snob factor is pretty prevalent amoung all of the different Chinese regions. Honkies are famous for looking down at their Mainland “country bumpkin” cousins. Ironically, even today, one can easily find Hong Kongese who have never been across the border into Mainland China. That said, based on my 16 years of coming to China, IMHO, I think the biggest snobs are the Shanghaiese.
you pinned it, China Guy.
[slight hijack]
i’ve been learning the long-form type of written mandarin for all my life, but never the simplified kind. thus, “china chinese” is nearly incomprehensible to me sometimes. imagine someone like me trying to puzzle out cantonese… shudder
[/hijack]
Thank you all! I appreciate the enlightenment.
More than once I have observed this rather amusing situation, where a native Mandarin speaker and a native Cantonese speaker were forced to use English to talk to one another. Both understood a completely foreign language better than each other’s mother tounge!
For a great book about China that touches (somewhat) on this subject read “Iron & Silk” by Mark Salzman. Salzman writes about his experiences as an English teacher and martial arts student in China.
China Guy writes:
> To answer the OP, Mandarin and Cantonese use different
> tones and pronunciations. It is not like the difference
> between say Portuguese and Spanish (although I speak
> neither of these), but more like English and Spanish or
> English and French.
Actually, it is closer to the difference between Portuguese and Spanish than it is to the difference between English and Spanish. Portuguese and Spanish are mutually incomprehensible, but a speaker of one can sort of make out what a speaker of the other is saying if he gets a lot of practice at it. Mandarin and Cantonese are a little further from each other than that, but not as far apart as English and Spanish are from another.
I think that the best analogy for an English speaker would be to imagine that English, German, Dutch, and Swedish were all referred to as “Germanic” and that all used a single set of characters instead of an alphabet. These languages are mutually incomprehensible, but a speaker of one can with practice sometimes understand some words in another of the languages if he figures out the ways in which they differ in pronounciation.
So for a native English speaker, which of the two is harder to learn: Mandarin or Cantonese?
It’s just about the same amount of effort to learn either one for an English speaker.
Assuming that you will actually study the language instead of expecting to become fluent by osmosis, the two are probably pretty much the same.
I speak fluent Mandarin (4 years university study, plus a whole lot more) but simply horrendous and extremely basic Cantonese (never studied, but lived and worked in Hong Kong for many years).
There are a lot more Westerners who study and speak Mandarin than there are who speak Cantonese. The ones who speak good Cantonese are the ones that systematically studied the language.