Any 1 know the difference between Cantonese and Mandorin....if yeah do tell us what :D :D :D :D :D :D
Discounting Mandarin chinese,the official language of the people`s republic of china or P.R.C here after.There are 9 other groups of dialects. 70 % speak Mandarin.....but this does not mean it is therre first language. Cantonese is one of the main groups of dialect spoken in Honk Kong, Macau, Guangdong and Guangxi!.....Although cantonese speakers read & write mandarin, cantonese is dialect is different sentence structure, pronounciation and to some extent grammar and vocabulary. Basic bottom line is this George......Cantonese speakers speak in cantonese dialect but write in another way...mandarin...
Chinese (mandarin) is not written using an alphabet as we know it so to speak...but with characters or ideograms. This system evolved from very basic pictograms used by primative hunter gatherer types to record men, animals objects etc....Over time this representional language has changed beyond recogniti0on and witha few very small exceptions before any one jumps down my throat!! it is impossible tosee how any particular character came to representits current meaning.....you keeping up??!!
Following the founding of P.R.C, the goverment in Bejing set up a commitee to reform the language. Some estimated 2200 characters where simplified. However communities outside the P.R.C mainly Hong Kong and Taiwan continue to use the full form characters..just to confuse us more i guess!!! :P
As an example George.....a good guess is around 56,000 ideograms exsist....burt many are obsolete......a well educated person in China would know between 6- 8000 charcters....To read a paper you would probably need to know about 2/3000........although maybe 1500 would be enuff to get the jist of it....
Cantonese is composed less of vowels and consonants than of syllables, consisting of a cononant and a vowel...you still with me?....It also has its fair share of homonyms (words with different meaning but with identical spelling.eg saw in english) In reality every syllable is pronounced with one (and this is the hard part!!) of 9 tones..eg high/rising/falling etc...it is very difficult for non natives to hear these tones let alone reproduce them!! hence the phonetic transliteration(put that in scrabble!!) system used in many books and websites.Hope this helps.....
......NEXT........ :P