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.
Best Answer: Unless they are bi-lingual, they can barely understand each other. I frequent Hong Kong almost every month, the locals who have lived in Hong Kong all their life and mainly spoke cantonese cannot speak / understand mandarin. And for Mainlanders who goes to Hong Kong, they usually have a hard time understanding the cantonese. Some neighboring cities of Hong Kong like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, where cantonese are spoken a lot, the locals can sometimes be bi-lingual in mandarin and cantonese.
Nationally people speak mandarin Chinese, or putonghua, with most local dialects varying slightly from the standard Chinese, but Cantonese, a dialect popular in Guangdong provâ¦ince and among many overseas Chinese, differs largely from the mandarin in pronunciation (not so in writing).