What is the difference in Cantonese and Mandarin?

What is the difference in Cantonese and Mandarin?

Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong, Macau, GuangZhou, and Southern parts of China in that vicinity. Mandarin is spoken in Mainland China and Taiwan. Cantonese and Mandarin are written in the same way, though Cantonese favors traditional Chinese characters rather than simplified. Mandarin has 4 tones.

How is Hokkien different from Mandarin?

Hokkien has one of the most diverse phoneme inventories among Chinese varieties, with more consonants than Standard Mandarin and Cantonese. Vowels are more-or-less similar to that of Standard Mandarin. Hokkien varieties retain many pronunciations that are no longer found in other Chinese varieties.

Do Cantonese and Mandarin have the same grammar?

Is Mandarin grammar different to Cantonese grammar? While pronunciation is completely different in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, the grammar is almost identical. Cantonese, however, is slightly more fluid in its sentence structure, and can change round the order of words with much more ease than in Mandarin.

Is Shanghainese mutually intelligible with Mandarin?

Shanghainese is part of the larger Wu Chinese group of Chinese languages. It is not mutually intelligible with any dialects of Mandarin Chinese, or Cantonese, Southern Min (such as Hokkien-Taiwanese), and any other Chinese languages outside Wu. Modern Shanghainese, however, has been influenced by standard Chinese.

What is the difference between Mandarin and Chinese?

Mandarin is a dialect of Chinese. Chinese is a language (Mandarin is one of the dialects of Chinese alongside Shanghainese, Cantonese and many more). With English in England you have a number of dialects – Cockney, Scouse, Geordie etc.

What is the difference between Hokkien and Cantonese?

The reason for such a huge difference is that, Hokkien is a much older language, older than Cantonese. It might have descended directly from old Chinese. Linguists say that, more than two thousand years ago, during the Qin Dynasty, the Han people in the north started to migrate to Fujian due to the war.

Is Hokkien difficult?

Hokkien (also known as Taiwanese in Taiwan) is one of the hardest Chinese languages – Min Chinese group of Chinese Languages that originated from Fujian are the hardest Chinese languages to master for foreigners.

Can a Mandarin speaker understand Shanghainese?

Qiu Gui Su is a native Mandarin speaker who has taught Mandarin Chinese for over 20 years. However, the traditional language of the Shanghai region is Shanghainese, which is a dialect of Wu Chinese which is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin Chinese. …

What’s the hardest language to learn?

Mandarin
Mandarin As mentioned before, Mandarin is unanimously considered the toughest language to master in the world! Spoken by over a billion people in the world, the language can be extremely difficult for people whose native languages use the Latin writing system.

What languages are spoken in Shanghai?

Since Shanghai is in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the official language of the city is standard Mandarin Chinese, also known as Putonghua. However, the traditional language of the Shanghai region is Shanghainese, which is a dialect of Wu Chinese which is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin Chinese.

Do they speak Mandarin in Shanghai?

In general, they speak Mandarin. But the natives of Shanghai speak in their own Shanghai dialect. Most people in the city though can somehow understand English. Cantonese on the other hand is spoken by natives of Guangdong and in Hong Kong, both which are far down the south.

What are the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese?

• Cantonese is older of the two languages being in existence 2000 years ago while Mandarin is just 700-800 years ago. • The characters in Mandarin have been simplified in 1950 while characters in Cantonese are still traditional. • Cantonese has 9 tones while mandarin has just 4 making it easier to learn than Cantonese.

Is the Mandarin and the Cantonese the same language?

Mandarin and Cantonese are both dialects of Chinese , not different languages . Other dialects of Chinese include Taiwanese, Shanghainese, and Hakka. Cantonese use is centered around Canton, i.e. Guangzhou in Guangdong province.