Learn Chinese - ZapChinese

As a follow up question about the difference between traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese, a ZapChinese visitor emailed me asking how different from each other are Mandarin and Cantonese.

Let me start with Cantonese. Cantonese is a dilect version of Chinese. As a dilect, it does not have its own writing system since it is just a way how people pronounce it. So in the region of Canton (including Hong Kong), people still use Canton as their daily language and most of them can also use Mandarin, the official Chinese pronunciation system.

To generalize a bit from Cantonese, there are in fact a lot of versions of Chinese dilects such as thoese spoken in Shanghai region, Sichuan region, Fujian region. But why people often take Cantonese as a version Chinese? It is because most of the first generation Chinese people that left China to all over the workd are from Canton region.

Again, all these dialects differ only in pronunication but not in writing. To make sure all Chinese from different regions can understand each other, people choose to speak Mandarin since Mandarin is based on the accent of Beijing dilect. Beijing has been China's capital for past hundreds of years. Just like London's accent is the base for English language and Paris accent for French, the dilect in a capital city often becomes the dominant stadard for the country's language for a country. This is also true for Chinese.

So in case, you are considering choose the accent to learn Chinese, I of course would recommned you to follow mandarin system.

Also, Zapchinese.com only provide mandarin pronunciation system.