Question:
Do you think people in China , Singapore etc understand either language?
Is there a big difference between the two or is it more like english/english
and american/english??
Answer:
The written language is the same*, but the two spoken languages are
very different. Maybe more like Italian and French. People in China
typically speak their own dialect and the national language
(Mandarin), so outside of South China few would understand Cantonese.
More people in China speak Shanghainese than Cantonese, BTW, and there
are at least half a dozen other dialects with at least 10,000,000
native speakers.
If you're looking for a language to learn- learn Mandarin unless you
have a very specific reason to learn another dialect.
* There are two forms of characters- traditional and simplified.
Taiwan and Hong Kong mostly use the former, and China (and, I think,
Singapore use the latter). There are also a few regional idioms,
AFAIUI. There are also two or three modern transliteration schemes to
describe the pronouciation of Chinese characters- Pinyin, Bompomofo
(which uses simple phonetic characters) and Wade-Giles. China and
Singapore use Hanyu Pinyin. Taiwan uses the latter two, though I think
they are now using Pinyin also for romanization.
Submit Your
Own Answer!
