Mandarin is a very interesting language because there are hundreds if not thousands of dialects across China that can vary substantially. For a while I lived i

Mandarin is a very interesting language because there are hundreds if not thousands of dialects across China that can vary substantially. For a while I lived in China and could speak the Beijing dialect well enough to get to know someone and engage in small talk about the NBA. I took a train trip from Beijing to Lanzhou which is like 1500 km west. My buddies and I got off the train and couldn't understand a lick for the first 2 days. Then there's southern China which speaks Cantonese, which is about 100 million people give or take.