Mandarin v. Cantonese?
I’m going to be moving to Guangzhou in a few months and my employer offers Mandarin lessons. That’s great and all but they speak Cantonese in GZ. I’ve ordered software to try to learn Cantonese on my own but how much different is it from Mandarin? Is it like the difference between Spanish and Portugese where two individuals could be speaking both languages and still understand each other, is it simply a different dialect or are they completely dissimilar?
Maybe a gifted linguist could learn one Chinese dialect and pick up the other almost instantly, but I’m not a gifted linguist. China is a very large and very culturally diverse country. Being “Chinese” is sort of like being “European”, because of the vast cultural differences.
To my way of thinking, Mandarin is far more useful to learn than Cantonese.
I work in a small town in eastern Taiwan. The local people speak Taiwanese amongst each other, and it’s different enough from Mandarin to sound like a different language.
Mandarin is taught is school, as the official language. After 1949, children were punished in school for speaking Taiwanese, just as North American Aboriginal kids were beaten for speaking indigenous languages.
The Taiwanese-speaking locals are very patient and kind with my halting Mandarin. Nobody speaks English around here.