Learn Cantonese or Mandarin?

I want to learn Cantonese, but I was speaking to a colleague who said it was all but a dying language and that Mandarin was much more worthwhile. Is it true?


Mandarin or Cantonese?


1.Which is the hardest?

2. Which is more common?

3. Which should I learn first?

Cantonese is not a dying language. It is interesting with lots of cultural background! Since it is a dialect and elder language, Cantonese is more difficult than Mandarin. Cantonese is common language in HK and you should learn Cantonese first if you are staying in HK while Mandarin is a must in Mainland China.

Hello,


In fact the Sinogermania Language Centre, located in Sham Shui Po, offers both Cantonese and Mandarin courses. You could try to contact us by sinogermania@yahoo.com so that we could offer you trial lessons in both Mandarin and Cantonese, and then you could decide with which one you would continue!


regards

i struggled for learning Mandarin or Cantonese once, but i choose Cantonese finally as i can practice everywhere in HK; indeed, it is useful and interesting!

Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin and more informal than Mandarin. If you want to get acculturated in local culture, etc, go with Cantonese. If it is for professional purposes, Mandarin is the one. Same goes if you're interested in literature/history/cultural variety. More and more HKers nowadays speak decent Mandarin. When/if you visit Taiwan, Singapore, etc, you'll immediately realize your "Cantonese" is practically as foreign as Swahili.

I learnt Cantonese two years ago at Emperor Group Centre, Wanchai. Only for survival. It is hard but useful if you are going to stay in HK. Forget the exact name. HKLLC?

Thanks all, I decided to learn Cantonese. I live in Central so Wanchai looks great for me.

Lucegy, May I ask whether? This language centre is good or not? How long I can cope with basic life conversation?

I took Cantonese course in HK Language Learning Centre which is located in Wanchai! You may google it for more information.


I took the course on and off about 7 months i think? And cover to Intermediate level. Now i can handle some simple conversation with local people! Athough I can't fully understand, it is really excited:)

You can learn some practical Cantonese with New Concept Mandarin, it is really fun.

If you live in hong kong, you need cantonese!

The total population of using Cantonese worldwide is same as that of Japanese-120 millions something.

out of the 4 major ethnic chinese communities around the world ( mainland china, taiwan, singapore and hongkong/macau), the first three have all adopted mandarin as their official language despite native mandarin speakers only make up a small proportion of the population in taiwan(less than 20%) and singapore(possibly even less than 5%)?


why?


relevant read:


"Why Does Mandarin Win Out Cantonese as the Standard Spoken Version of Chinese?"

http://hkgirltalk.com/2012/05/28/why-does-mandarin-win-out-cantonese-as-the-standard-spoken-version-of-chinese/



"Why is Cantonese unpopular to foreign ears?" (asked by a hongkong native studying in the UK)

http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/read.php?1,97273


" I think Cantonese is one of the harshest languages around, unlike, say, Mandarin or other East Asian languages. Cantonese is simply very cacophonous and displeasing to the ear.

As someone who speaks both Cantonese & English fluently (but not Mandarin), I find these two languages are not entirely compatible. I've heard of many anecdoctal reports of how people from HK who speak Cantonese who cannot adjust to NOrth American culture because of this linguistic barrier, as opposed to someone who speaks Mandarin who nonethless could acculturate relatively easier in spite of a greater cultural gulf between mainland China and NOrth America.

Thoughts? Is linguistics/language playing a role here?"


cantonese has more hard and throaty or gutteral consonants and less palatalization than other major chinese dialects. cantonese also retains the most unreleased final consonants, which are accompanied by glottal stop.


“throaty” sounds and glottal stop are often percieved as unpleasant or harsh to ears.



“For more than four centuries, guttural (from Latin guttur ‘throat’ via Medieval Latin gutturalis) has been used to describe consonants articulated towards the back of the oral cavity.


guttural has been inexactly associated with foreign consonants that sound “throaty” to English speakers.


speech described as guttural may be deemed not just substandard but sublinguistic (at times even subhuman).


The value of speech patterns labeled guttural, in other words, is already quite low in the estimation of many, even without the help of the similar-sounding but etymologically unrelated gutter. Add to this the fact that gutter is often applied attributively to indicate coarse speech (“gutter language,” “gutter talk,” “gutter slang,” etc.), and the conflation of guttural and gutter to describe vulgar or distasteful forms of communication seems practically inevitable. From there it’s a short step to Jon Corzine’s “guttural politics.”


cantonese is on its way out. its a backward and dying dialect of the chinese language. it has evolved much slower than mandarin due to the warm weather in the cantonese area and the segregation of the cantoense area from central china.


cantonese sounds much less pleasant to ears than mandarin and is harder to learn because its less well regulated and its spoken form being incompatible with the standard written chinese. cantonese has never been well regarded by other chinese . hk's glory in the last half century might have given cantonese a twist of fate but its destined to be short-lived. hk's glory has more to do with benefitting from mainland china's ideology failure and the british rule than anything of cantonese origin.


being backward and unpleasant is a cause for discrimination if we are intuitively aspired to improvement and progression.