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Here is an example of a plausible conversation in Mandarin and a plausible conversation in Cantonese to show how different the two languages are, with different

Here is an example of a plausible conversation in Mandarin and a plausible conversation in Cantonese to show how different the two languages are, with different words (not cognate, and thus not written with the same Chinese character) in places even where you would expect English and German, or Spanish and French, to be cognate. I checked the example dialogues against dialogues posted online by native speakers of each of the languages, both for accuracy in transcribing the Chinese characters and for natural idiomatic expression in each language. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective. Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077/ http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodied-Meaning/dp/0824827600/ http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie... [4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm

quantisan 12y ago
Great examples. I recall back when I was grade school in Hong Kong, we learned to read and write Chinese the standard "Mandarin" way. It is like formal speak. But in everyday conversation, people speak the "Cantonese" colloquial way. It is quite weird when I think about it now how everyone speaks "Cantonese" when it's never taught in school. It's like us learning regular English in school but everyone speaks Shakespeare or something (of course it's not that dramatic of a difference). The written system in Hong Kong uses the standard "Mandarin" saying. Most serious Hong Kong newspapers (business, etc) "speak" the standard "Mandarin" way.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese (Taiwan dialect of southern Min Chinese language) at home, and then attended school entirely in the medium of Mandarin. She says that school pupils used to be fined for speaking Taiwanese in class. The pupils responded by learning sentences that sounded like legitimate Mandarin sentences, but were actually sound-alikes for sentences that made crude insults in Taiwanese. The last time we lived in Taiwan (1998-2001), the government had relaxed its former stringent prohibitions on public use of Taiwanese, and we would see handwritten signs in Chinese characters in markets with obviously Taiwanese vocabulary and phrasing. Similarly, when I have traveled to Hong Kong, I have seen printed official signs that are quite baffling to someone who has only studied standard modern written Chinese, but are perfectly understandable to readers who know how Cantonese is written in Chinese characters.
- Umofomia 12y ago
  It's like us learning regular English in school but everyone speaks Shakespeare or something (of course it's not that dramatic of a difference). Actually it is a pretty dramatic difference. Cantonese and Mandarin split roughly 1000 years ago, whereas the difference between Shakespearian English (which is considered Early Modern English) and Modern English is only a few hundred years. In addition, Modern English is a descendant of Early Modern English whereas Cantonese and Mandarin are not descendants of one another. The Chinese writing system tends to obscure these differences because cognates among the different varieties of Chinese are represented using the same characters, even though their pronunciations have diverged considerably. There are vocabulary and grammatical differences as well, though they are not as big. The difference is more akin to if English speakers had to write in German†, but because they generally don't know how to actually speak German, they would read it using English pronunciation instead. For instance, if you wanted to say "I know that you said that", you might have to write: Ich weiß dass du das gesagt hast. But you would read it "in your own language" as: I wit that thou that y-said hast. This is similar to the current relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin. Cantonese speakers write in Mandarin (i.e. "Standard Chinese") and read it "in Cantonese", even though when speaking, they would really say something almost completely different. When Cantonese speakers actually write in Cantonese, Mandarin speakers generally would have difficulty reading it. † The difference between English and German actually spans more than 1000 years, but I'm not as familiar with other closer Germanic languages with which to provide a good example.

quantisan 12y ago

Great examples. I recall back when I was grade school in Hong Kong, we learned to read and write Chinese the standard "Mandarin" way. It is like formal speak. But in everyday conversation, people speak the "Cantonese" colloquial way. It is quite weird when I think about it now how everyone speaks "Cantonese" when it's never taught in school. It's like us learning regular English in school but everyone speaks Shakespeare or something (of course it's not that dramatic of a difference). The written system in Hong Kong uses the standard "Mandarin" saying. Most serious Hong Kong newspapers (business, etc) "speak" the standard "Mandarin" way.

tokenadult 12y ago
My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese (Taiwan dialect of southern Min Chinese language) at home, and then attended school entirely in the medium of Mandarin. She says that school pupils used to be fined for speaking Taiwanese in class. The pupils responded by learning sentences that sounded like legitimate Mandarin sentences, but were actually sound-alikes for sentences that made crude insults in Taiwanese. The last time we lived in Taiwan (1998-2001), the government had relaxed its former stringent prohibitions on public use of Taiwanese, and we would see handwritten signs in Chinese characters in markets with obviously Taiwanese vocabulary and phrasing. Similarly, when I have traveled to Hong Kong, I have seen printed official signs that are quite baffling to someone who has only studied standard modern written Chinese, but are perfectly understandable to readers who know how Cantonese is written in Chinese characters.
Umofomia 12y ago
It's like us learning regular English in school but everyone speaks Shakespeare or something (of course it's not that dramatic of a difference). Actually it is a pretty dramatic difference. Cantonese and Mandarin split roughly 1000 years ago, whereas the difference between Shakespearian English (which is considered Early Modern English) and Modern English is only a few hundred years. In addition, Modern English is a descendant of Early Modern English whereas Cantonese and Mandarin are not descendants of one another. The Chinese writing system tends to obscure these differences because cognates among the different varieties of Chinese are represented using the same characters, even though their pronunciations have diverged considerably. There are vocabulary and grammatical differences as well, though they are not as big. The difference is more akin to if English speakers had to write in German†, but because they generally don't know how to actually speak German, they would read it using English pronunciation instead. For instance, if you wanted to say "I know that you said that", you might have to write: Ich weiß dass du das gesagt hast. But you would read it "in your own language" as: I wit that thou that y-said hast. This is similar to the current relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin. Cantonese speakers write in Mandarin (i.e. "Standard Chinese") and read it "in Cantonese", even though when speaking, they would really say something almost completely different. When Cantonese speakers actually write in Cantonese, Mandarin speakers generally would have difficulty reading it. † The difference between English and German actually spans more than 1000 years, but I'm not as familiar with other closer Germanic languages with which to provide a good example.