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General info - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_(linguistics)

If anyone here has any other reccommendations for websites/dictionaries/grammar books etc, please feel free to tell us about them in this thread.

Really?

Well, how about this?

My mom is from The Republic of China (Taiwan), and she can't understand Taiwanese. x3 Then again, not a whole lot of people can. o.o;

My family is speaks Cantonese and since I live in Australia, my speak English most of the time. The hardest thing I find about learning Cantonese is that you don't write down colloquial expressions. What you read is different to what you say in everyday life.
Why did Cantonese have to be such a colloquial language? crying

I dont think Cantonese really has a chance of becoming a dead language any time soon considering the amount of people that speak it. The Chinese government is and has been campaigning for one language to be used exclusively, but to my knowledge the use of Cantonese is not very restricted [if at all] and is widely spoken in Guangdong and such. Mandarin will always have a great proportion of the Chinese population speaking in that language, but I really doubt it would be able to completely overwrite Cantonese. Before that, I would expect other lesser spoken Chinese languages to become "dead", so even if Cantonese were to die out that would take many generations in my opinion ^^ but I would really doubt even that. So being able to speak Cantonese is indeed a good skill ! 86 million people is a great number of people to be able to commicate with smile

Something interesting about tones:
Mandarin: 4 tones
Shanghainese: 5 tones [or 2 depending on analysis]
Cantonese: 6 tones
Taiwanese: 7 tones
Teochew: 8 tones

But one should be aware that the number of tones depends on the way they are counted 3nodding

I've always wondered how much written Cantonese a Mandarin speaker (and writer) could understand. Does anyone have any information relating to this?

I think a lot of it might be difficult, but the general meanings wud be understood. However, compare these sentences:

佢哋喺度諗緊點樣先可以返屋企呀﹗ 但係依家仲諗唔倒﹐乜佢哋唔係好叻咖咩??

他們在想怎麼樣才可以返回家﹗ 但是現在還想不到﹐他們不是很聰明嗎?? (I think this is correct)

Only five of those characters are the same, and this isn't even a particularly difficult sentence either;a general-ish sort of thing.. Without any previous knowledge of Cantonese, could Mandarin speakers understand it?

But, I do think I'm exaggerating. I think a lot of it would be understood in your every day, run of the mill sort of thing. They can be very similar as well. Compare these two sentences:

我好愛你﹐因為我覺得你好靚女呀。同我一齊去英國呀﹗

我很愛你﹐因為我覺得你是個美女。跟我一起去英國吧﹗

I actually intended this to be quite a similar pair of sentences, but it turns out it has quite a few differences... However, the meaning is probably apparent to a Mandarin speaker.


Speaking wise though, it's actually really different. Someone asked me the difference between the dialects recently, and it got me thinking.

If someone read the romanisations of both languages, would they think they were related? I've romanised the above two sentences in (slightly edited) Jyutping and Pinyin respectively. I also did it tonelessly, because it doesn't seem particularly relevant here, and every character is a separate word. :

Ngo hou oi nei, yan wai ngo gok dak nei hou leng nui aa. Tung ngo yat chai hui ying gwok aa!

Wo hen ai ni, yin wei wo jue de ni shi ge mei nuu. Gen wo yi qi qu ying guo ba!

IMO, they look similar, but different at the same time. I definitely wouldn't assume they're the same language though, and definitely not mutually intelligible. There might be a mistake or two in the Pinyin, but it should be generally accurate. Feel free to correct smile

Ps. Just for fun, I'm also going to romanise the top two sentences:

Kui dei hai dou lam gan dim yeung sin ho yi faan uk kei aa! daan hai yi gaa jung lam m dou, mat kui dei m hai hou lek ga me?

ta men zai xiang zen me yang cai ke yi fan hui jia! dan shi xian zai hai xiang bu dao, ta me bu shu hen cong ming ma?