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).
, 8 Years Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. 1  Cantonese (80 million native speakers) is a lively language and will endear you do those in Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong province. 2  Mandarin is by far the more common language, and the #1 tongue in the world in terms of native speakers. One of the reasons that someone may think that Cantonese speakers number the same as Mandarin is that the first Chinese immigrants to the United States were from Guangdong province and spoke Cantonese or regional dialects.