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).
However, because of migration of Cantonese speaking people from Hong Kong to major cities of the world, Cantonese is alive and kicking and has become a competitor of Mandarin internationally. Cantonese is mostly an oral language and when Cantonese speaking people have to read and write, they make use of mandarin.