So it seems as though Mandarin is more practical than Cantonese. That's not to say that learning Cantonese is a waste of time, and for some people, it may be the better choice, but for most people wanting to speak "Chinese", Mandarin is the way to go.
>For Mandarin speakers: For people without any exposure of Cantonese, they will normally not understand a word of Cantonese. For Cantonese speakers: As Mandarin is the lingua franca in mainland China and Taiwan and one of the official languages in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Mandarin Chinese
Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. But writing isn't the only difficult part of learning Mandarin. The tonal nature of the language makes speaking it very hard as well.Standard Chinese, often called Mandarin, is the official standard language of China and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called "Huáyŭ" ?? or simply Chinese). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing.
That being said, because the Chinese writing system is based on thousands of characters each representing a single word rather than a phonetic alphabet, written Chinese is intelligible across these dialects. China also has other languages that are not considered Chinese, such as Uyghur and Tibetan.
Chinese Speaking Countries in Asia
Mandarin is an official spoken language in China, Taiwan and Singapore.Hanyu means Chinese language, meaning it can include other dialects i.e. Cantonese Putonghua is mandarin and is what's taught here.
It turns out that it takes 2,200 class hours to learn Mandarin for English speakers. If you put the rest of your life on hold and focused only on studying Chinese – at 5 hours of practice a day, it would take you 88 weeks.
??? (Putonghua) means the standard (spoken) language in China, which is usually called Mandarin in English. During the early 20th century, people in China call it ?? (Guoyu, national language), to distinguish it from any dialects.
actually there are no much difference between Mandarin and Putonghua. Or you can also say Chinese. it's just when you say Mandarin,it is more official ,and Putonghua is more casual ,and it is the direct pronunciation translation of Madarin.
Cantonese is an East Asian language which comes from Canton, southern China. Often, people use the word 'Cantonese' to refer to the Guangzhou dialect, Hong Kong dialect, Xiguan dialect, Wuzhou dialect and Tanka dialect of Yue. It is also the most common language of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and North America.
Bruce Lee spoke Cantonese which is from his upbringing in Hong Kong, where Cantonese is spoken, whereas Mandarin is spoken in China and other parts of Asia. But there's not much recorded evidence of him speaking Cantonese (there are some recordings though), he almost always seemed to speak English later on.
Over 2 million Americans speak varieties of Chinese, with Mandarin becoming increasingly common due to immigration from mainland China and to some extent Taiwan. Despite being called dialects or varieties, Cantonese, Taishanese, and Mandarin etc. The actual number of Cantonese speakers was probably higher.
Cantonese is widely spoken in the south of China in Guangdong and also in Hong Kong and Macau. If you are interested in learning the language for business purposes, Mandarin is your best option. Most people doing business in China will use Mandarin to communicate.
What may surprise people is that Cantonese is actually older than Mandarin. Cantonese is approximately 2000 years old and belongs to the Yue family of Chinese languages (??) spoken in southeast China. The term Cantonese comes from Guangzhou, aka Canton, the capital of the Guangdong province in China (pictured above).
The most obvious difference between traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese is the way that the characters look. Traditional characters are typically more complicated and have more strokes, while simplified characters are, as the name suggests, simpler and have fewer strokes.
