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What are the Differences between Mandarin and Cantonese?

May 31, 2009 at 06:47 | Posted in China Business 中国商务, Language 语言 | Leave a comment
Tags: Cantonese, Chinese, dialect, Mandarin, pinyin

The main differences between Mandarin and Cantonese are the pronunciations. For example, in Mandarin, the word for “look, see” is pronounced as kan, while it is tai in Cantonese. There are other differences in usage of words and grammar.

Mandarin and Cantonese share the same written language, Chinese. Standard written Chinese is understandable to all Chinese dialects. This is like the Americans and the British. Both can read English even though Americans and Brits have different dialects.

Mandarin and Cantonese both use “pinyin” to represent the pronunciation. “Pinyin” means “spelling the sound”. It is in the form of alphabet. For example, the pronunciation for the word “English”(“ 英语”) in pinyin is “yingyu”.