> I'm not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly similar. I experienced it. Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character s

> I'm not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly similar. I experienced it. Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. In writing, we would use either simplified or traditional character sets. Yes, that's true in writing. But it's only true because there are only written forms of Classical Chinese, Modern Vernacular Mandarin and Modern Vernacular Cantonese and the last one is only really used for newscasting and court reporting. Everyone who reads and writs Chinese is thinking in Manadarin, even if they can't speak it. The different Sinitic topolects are as divergent as the Romance languages or the Arabic "dialects". They're mutually unintelligible. FuSha or Modern Standard Arabic, is a foreign language to basically every Arabic speaker, as Latin is to Romance language speakers or Mandarin is to the 60% of Sinitic language speakers who don't speak Mandarin at home.