Spoken Chinese: What Dialect Do You Speak?
In our last newsletter, we covered the major difference between traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Even with the difference created in the past several decades, written Chinese remains largely unified among Chinese communities all over the world. However, spoken Chinese is a completely different story. Mandarin is considered standard spoken Chinese that most Chinese people can understand. But Chinese people still have a hard time understanding each other even today when they travel a few hundred miles away from their hometowns. It is all because of the different dialects, not to mention various minority languages. The author of this newsletter used to travel in various areas in China where Cantonese, Minnan, and Tibetan are spoken, he needed interpreters unless it was in written Chinese.
To understand this phenomenon, check out the following video.
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