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Q: Cantonese - what's different about the writing?
Same characters? How do they incorporate the different sounds? How much Cantonese can a mandarin-speaking Chinese 'get'?
12 years 8 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
Cantonese has appeared in writing since the 17th century. It is used mainly in personal correspondence, diaries, comics, poetry, advertising, popular newspapers, magazines and to some extent in literature. There are two standard ways of written Cantonese: a formal version and a colloquial version. The formal version is quite different from spoken Cantonese but very similiar to Standard Chinese and can be understood by Mandarin speakers without too much difficulty. The colloquial version is much closer to spoken Cantonese and largely unintelligible to Mandarin speakers.
In Hong Kong, colloquial Cantonese is written with a mixture of standard Chinese characters and over a thousand extra characters invented specifically for Cantonese. The extra characters are included in the Hong Kong Supplementary Characters Set (HKSCS).
Special Cantonese characters
A selection of characters and words used in colloquial written Cantonese, with Yale romanization, their equivalents in Standard Written Chinese with Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciation, and English translations.
Note
啤啤仔 (bihbījái) is often written BB仔
The above was copied from http://www.omniglot.com/chinese/cantonese.htm
Everything! It's like Japanese to Korean or Mandarin to Cantonese. It's different in it's totality. You usually write like you talk and since Cantonese is a separate language from Mandarin it will be written differently. Mandarin speakers cannot really understand Cantonese speakers unless they had taken some sort of class. Although many Cantonese speakers can understand Mandarin it's not true the other way around.
HugAPanda:
Michael Thomas, you are the Santorum of eChinaCities.com.
HappyExPat:
Mattaya isn totally wrong again. Orally, Cantonese and Mandarin are very similar, and if speaking slowly, two persons talking could understand each other. True, Cantonese has more tones (at least 9 that I am aware of, but some claim as may as 13), versus Mandarin only 4, but in a conversation they are very similar. But when writing times comes, they are not that similar, but never as far away as Japanese and Korean, as it was claimed.
My GF is not fluent at all in Cantonese, but in Guangzhou or Hong Kong, she can ask questions, be understood, and understand replies.
How do they incorporate the different sounds?
Just to answer that one specific question: They both come from the same ancient language. Think of "What is that?" and "Was ist das?"
If Europe used a logographic system, "What" might be 
, "is" might be 
and "that" might be 
, so both languages would write the two related, but differently pronounced sentences as .
Of course, with longer sentences the differences would pile up, but essentially words with the same historical roots would be written the same way in spite of the pronounciation.
But people almost never write in Cantonese any way, except for text messages, "funny" ads, and dialogue in trashy Hong Kong novels. Even HKers generally write in a form of Mandarin, even if they have no clue how to say it out loud.
Sorry, but this article is not for me...
I don't have any proficiency in mandarin or Cantonese, how I can associate both, or differ one from another.... or also some history related??? .
I definitely need take some lesson about 
.
Really interesting post. I hadn't actually been aware of this. So when Mandarin-language television is shown in the South and it is dubbed in writing, is it dubbed using the Cantonese character or it is dubbed in Mandarin characters?
