The Cantonese vs Mandarin or Mandari vs Cantonese Series (1)
Although Cantonese use the same set of Chinese characters (almost… maybe 5% difference), there are a lot of differences between Cantonese and Mandarin. Not just the differences in pronunciation, but also in grammar and word usage.

Today, we are starting a series to show the differences for those who are interested.

For beginners of Chinese, we do not encourage learning both Cantonese and Mandarin at the same time. You need to learn the one that you think is the most useful for you currently for one or two years and master the basic before you move onto the other.

I hope this series is useful for those Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking learners who want to learn the other one.

I can’t stress it enough: do not learn both languages at the same time. Master one first.

1) First major difference is pronunciation between Cantonese and Mandarin
A)Cantonese has at least 6 tones (some said 9 tones) while Mandarin has only 4 simple tones plus a neutral tone, which does not exit in Cantonese
e.g.
Here’s the tone comparison between Cantonese and Mandarin:
Cantonese:fu1夫 fu2虎 fu3富 fu4扶 fu5妇 fu6负 (click for details)
Mandarin: fu1夫 fu2福 fu3斧 fu4富/负 xing4fu 幸福=happy/happiness
Note that Mandarin xing4fu幸福 is pronounced as hang6fuk1幸福 in Cantonese
Any Mandarin word with tones from 1 to 4 may become a neutral tone (some mark it with 5) when it is the 2nd character of word. e.g. 欺负 qi1 fu5 = to bully

Cantonese tones become one of the hardest thing to learn for Mandarin-speaking people, but if enough listening and practice are done, it can be overcome more easily.

Please bookmark this series for more updates soon.
We use Jyutping for all examples of Cantonese words, and Pinyin for Mandarin.