Mandarin vs Cantonese
Written Chinese Chinese is a unique language. Unlike most other languages around the world, written Chinese uses a “pictorial” representation rather than a phonetic one. Chinese characters are not “sounded out” but are rather used to represent ideas. (e.g. 人 is the symbol for “person”.) Thousands of such symbols, or “radicals”, are combined into characters to form more complex ideas, independently from the sounds that verbal speakers might use to describe them. Speakers of different Chinese dialects often cannot understand each other verbally, but can…