Itâs good to remind ourselves of its many different uses, especially on those days when getting students to participate feels like pulling hensâ teeth. 1  Participation adds interest âItâs hard to maintain studentsâ focus and attention when all they hear is the professor talking.
Quora User, fluent speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese. Knowing Cantonese alone does not make you understand Mandarin due to the large differences in the language/dialect. However, I believe the majority of Cantonese speakers can understand Mandarin, but only because they have separately studied Mandarin (either formally in school, or self-taught).
Just ask to take a look first, if it's really in Cantonese and your background is only in Mandarin, you're very possibly not going to be able to handle it. tl;dr: there's a written system that speakers of all Chineses have access to, writing in your own language, however, is a different ballgame.