Chinese Languages

All blogs about Chinese Languages, click here :)

Mandarin or Cantonese?

This is a common question that I have to answer every single time when people know I am a Chinese. Well, I would say, neither of them. I was born and raise in Yunnan, southwest China, where Han Chinese speak southwestern Chinese dialect (I may want to call it Yunnanese Chinese) and other ethnic minority Chinese speak totally different language. For example, people from Shangri-la, northwest Yunnan, they speak Tibetan, Yunnanese Chinese and Mandarin Chinese.

Officially, my native language is Mandarin Chinese and personally, my native languages are two Southwestern Chinese dialects (Kunming dialect and Baoshan dialect) they are also known as Southwestern Mandarin. You know, it feels not so good to speak Mandarin all day for me. It feels like forcing American speak English in British accent all day long, imaging how hard is it.

Right, Cantonese, is also one kind of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong, Guangdong province (Canton), and some reagin in Guangxi province. Their accent is really heave so that people from outside of these places barley understand them..

You see, China is really diverse and huge. So many immigrants came to the United States before we discovered the Standard Chinese (Mandarin Chinese). Most of these immigrants were from Cantonese speaking area, which is the reason why Cantonese Chinese is so huge in North America.

Introduction of Chinese characters 🙂

ShaoLan Hsueh: For foreigners, learning to speak Chinese is a hard task. But learning to read the beautiful, often complex characters of the Chinese written language may be less difficult. ShaoLan walks through a simple lesson in recognizing the ideas behind the characters and their meaning — building from a few simple forms to more complex concepts. Call it Chineasy (Click to learn more).