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Originally Posted by DarkUmagon  lol come on man. Chinese dialects, are just dialects of CHINESE. For example, a person in Egypt speaks a different dialect of arabic, then a person in Iraq. etc. THey are sitll the same language |
I don't know if you speak a dialect of Chinese or not, but unlike different Japanese "dialects" which are mutually intelligible to each other, Chinese dialects are almost always completely unintelligible to each other (like I speak Mandarin and Taiwanese and I can only understand 1 or 2 words of what a Cantonese speaker is saying if he talked for an hour and just happened to use one or two words with the same/similar pronunciations in both Mandarin and Cantonese). Chinese dialects are as different as English is to German, Italian, Spanish, or French. English, German, Italian, Spanish, and French all use alphabets with very similar letters (a,b,c,d,e,f,g etc.) with some exceptions, but the languages are spoken in completely different ways (like hacer in spanish is pronounced ah-sehr while in english it is not). It is the same with Chinese dialects. Mandarin, Beijingnese, Shanghainese, Fujianese, Hokkien, Minnan Hua, Cantonese, Hakka, Taiwanese, etc. all use Chinese words/characters, but have completely different pronunciations and sometimes grammatical structures. So, the WRITTEN language is the same, but the pronunciations/grammatical structures and usages are very different. For example, Taiwanese is an offshoot of Hokkien/Minnan/Fujianese and incorporates some Japanese words (from the Japanese occupation) like "oba-san" for old woman and is pretty much unintelligible to non-Taiwanese speakers no matter what the Chinese dialect. China is basically one nation made up of many different countries; basically it is the Asian version of a VERY unified European Union where Mandarin is "common talk"/the universal language and everyone calls themselves "zhong guo ren" or people of the middle kingdom.