Help Learning Chinese?

Question

My business partner is Chinese and I would like to impress him by learning Chinese. The big thing now is learning Mandarin Chinese, but he speaks the Cantonese dialect. I tested him by asking him to say "horse" and "mom" and in his dialect and it was the same as it is in Mandarin, "ma" for each with a different tone, respecitvely. My question is that seeing as it is difficult to find a good Cantonese learning system in a Mandarin-lerning culture, is there really a huge different between the 2 dialects? If I learn Mandarin will I be able to understand his Cantonese dialect and vice-versa? Or is it wise to stick to learning Cantonese which is hard to come by?

Okay, let me just say this, if the 2 dialects are completely different, I would have no choice but to learn Cantonese since Mandarin would be a waste if I couldn't understand it! Learning Mandarin would be a waste, not the other way around.

Answer 1

As far as speaking is concerned, Mandarin and Cantonese are two completely differemt languages. So no, if you learn Mandarin, you won't understand his Cantonese. The question is, does your partner speak Cantonese only? Many cantonese can understand mandarin and can even speak mandarin. Neither dialect is easy to learn for a complete foreigner, and as mandarin is the dominant culture, I personally think it's not wise to spend a lot of time learning cantonese.

Answer 2

i speak cantonese and i don't really understand mandarin. there are bits and pieces, but not entirely. on the other hand, i'm assuming your partner is an average cantonese speaker probably born in china, so he can also speak mandarin or at least grew up learning both mandarin and cantonese. he should be able to at least understand mandarin even if he couldn't speak it.

my parents were born in china and they can speak both cantonese and mandarin but they speak cantonese more.

i'd suggest learning mandarin. it's a more common language. but if your only reason is to communicate with your partner, then learning cantonese is the way to go.

i think it's easier to pick up mandarin AFTER you learn cantonese. depends i guess. both languages are hard. i went to school for mandarin for 4 years and only learned how to write the word poo in chinese.

Answer 3

We be trained by way of memorizing characters and associating them with pix, just like what kindergarten youngsters do. We additionally must memorize the pinyin. Pinyin refers back to the intonation is which the phrase is learn. In Mandarin chinese language, there are four pinyins for every phrase, and in Cantonese chinese language, there are up to eight. I can not say the identical for different Chinese dialects as I do not talk all of them. Apart from that, chinese language characters have more than a few "ze phang" to symbolize more than a few classes of phrases. Say for illustration, the individual water has its precise ze phang. Anything related to water will include this ze phang in its individual, equivalent to ice. That makes it less difficult for us to memorize hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of Chinese characters

Answer 4

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