Mandarin vs Cantonese: how much do they really overlap? (video)
We compared 100 core words, 1,004 Hong Kong sentences and 29,969 shared words. Half the basic words match; the speech mostly doesn't. Plus which to learn.
Chapters
- 0:00Start
- 0:18The short answer
- 0:35Half the basic words match
- 1:54Who understands whom
- 2:48Hong Kong speaks one, writes another
- 3:52Sounds shift by rule
- 4:366 tones or 9?
- 5:00Who speaks each, and where
- 5:23Which should you learn?
- 6:05Where to learn Cantonese
- 6:25What to do next
- 6:43Try it out loud
Transcript
Start
In a listening test, Mandarin speakers caught just 3% of the words in Cantonese sentences. And Cantonese speakers, hearing Mandarin? They caught 90%. From SayMei Guides, by Mei Lin: Mandarin versus Cantonese. How much do they really overlap?
The short answer
The short answer: they share a writing standard, but not a spoken language. About half their most basic words are written the same. The speech mostly isn't. So which should you learn? The one your people speak. If no one comes to mind, start with Mandarin.
Half the basic words match
So how much do they overlap? We took 100 basic meanings, like fire, eat, he and not, and paired the everyday Mandarin word with the everyday Hong Kong Cantonese one. The verdict: 50 use the same written word, 21 a related one, and 29 a different one. Related words usually just drop a Mandarin suffix. Mandarin says 鼻子 for nose. Cantonese keeps only the first character. The words that change are the ones you use all day. Eat, drink, look, say, not. Ten of those 29 are words a Mandarin reader knows from formal writing: Cantonese eat is the first character of Mandarin 食物, food. Four are false friends. One character means walk in Mandarin, and run in Cantonese. And fifteen use characters standard Mandarin doesn't have. So why do other counts say 37% or 85%? Beijing University's 1964 survey wrote down colloquial Guangzhou speech: 36.9% the same. A 2007 survey mixed in formal writing: 85.2%. Count what people write, and Cantonese looks like Mandarin with a Southern accent. Count what they say, and it doesn't.
Who understands whom
Now, back to that listening test. It's a 2009 study by Tang Chaoju and Vincent van Heuven, with 47,250 answers. On single words, Cantonese listeners got 63% of the Mandarin ones, and Mandarin listeners 34% of the Cantonese. Guessing would score 10%. In whole sentences, the gap became a cliff: 90% against 3%. Why only one way? Exposure, not similarity. Even these rural listeners, chosen to be as monolingual as possible, mostly said they could speak Standard Mandarin: 63% of them. And it keeps spreading. On the mainland, 87.72% could use it in 2025. In Hong Kong, 54.2% spoke it in 2021. Nothing comparable pushes Cantonese north.
Hong Kong speaks one, writes another
Hong Kong is where it gets interesting. People there speak Cantonese, but mostly write Standard Written Chinese: the Mandarin-based standard, in Traditional characters. We compared 1,004 transcribed Hong Kong sentences with their written versions. In what are you looking for, only the word for you survives. Overall, just 34% of the spoken words reappear in writing. The good news: a Mandarin reader can follow the news pages of a Hong Kong newspaper. Expect Traditional characters and some local words. Written Cantonese is harder. Formal writing leaves Mandarin's 3,000 most common characters 0.7% of the time. Written colloquial Cantonese, 7.6%. Transcribed speech, 14.1%. But the gap is concentrated. Just twenty characters make up 81.2% of those Cantonese-only characters. The top one is the possessive particle, Mandarin's 的. Next is the word for he or she, Mandarin's 他.
Sounds shift by rule
Both languages descend from Middle Chinese, and each changed in its own regular way. We lined up 29,969 words found in both a Mandarin and a Hong Kong dictionary. One Cantonese syllable in six still ends in p, t or k, like ten, study and eat. Mandarin lost those endings centuries ago, so you learn them word by word. Consonants shift by rule. Mandarin r becomes a y sound in 98.2% of syllables: person, 人, starts with a y in Cantonese. Some shifts even keep a difference Mandarin lost: capital and essence sound the same in Mandarin, but not in Cantonese.
6 tones or 9?
So does Cantonese have six tones, or nine? With six tones, one syllable can mean poem, history, try, time, market or matter. The traditional count adds three short entering tones, on syllables ending in p, t or k. That makes nine. To write tones, there's Jyutping, the Cantonese pinyin, with each tone as a number.
Who speaks each, and where
Who speaks which? Mandarin is China's national language: almost nine in ten people on the mainland could use it by 2025. In Hong Kong, 88.2% usually speak Cantonese at home. And in England and Wales, 55,555 people name Cantonese as their main language, against 30,820 for Mandarin.
Which should you learn?
So, which should you learn? The language of the people you want to talk to. Choose Cantonese if your family speaks it: remember that 3% sentence score. Choose it if you live in Hong Kong, where daily life runs in Cantonese, or if you love Hong Kong films, Cantopop or TVB. Choose Mandarin if your people are in mainland China, Taiwan or Singapore, or if no one comes to mind. The main exams, HSK and TOCFL, test Mandarin, and it has far more courses, apps and tutors. Difficulty won't decide it: the US Foreign Service Institute puts both in its hardest category, about 88 weeks of full-time study.
Where to learn Cantonese
Where can you learn Cantonese? SayMei teaches Mandarin only, so the guide lists places to start that we haven't tested, like words.hk, Pleco and CantoneseClass101. One catch: Duolingo's Cantonese course is offered only to people who already speak Mandarin, says Duolingo's blog.
What to do next
What to do next? Name the people you want to talk to. No one comes to mind? Start with Mandarin. Cantonese-speaking family, or Hong Kong? Start with Cantonese. If you add the other language later, lean on the sound rules, and learn those twenty characters before reading Cantonese chat.
Try it out loud
If Mandarin is your language, you can talk with Mei Lin for free: your first lesson is 10 minutes, with no account and no card. The word explorer, the sound map and the four-question picker are all on the page at saymei dot app.