I think the classification of local Chinese tongues is a grey area. They are all based on the same writing system, but the variation in pronunciation and infor

I think the classification of local Chinese tongues is a grey area. They are all based on the same writing system, but the variation in pronunciation and informal vocabularies make them unintelligible from each other. They are more like the difference between, say, American and Jamaican English, than between two languages like English and French. If you are learning Chinese as a foreign language, it almost certainly means you are learning Standard Mandarin (Beijingese?), since it's the lingua franca of the Chinese world, unless it specifically mentions Cantonese or Min Nan, etc. I speak Mandarin and some Cantonese, Shaanxi, and Sichuan dialect, btw.