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).
While they are both tonal languages (where different tones give different meanings to the same sound), the number of tones is different. Mandarin has only four tones per sound, while Cantonese has at least six (and can have up to nine). Mandarin and Cantonese even have different vowels and consonants.