I was wondering is it possible to learn Cantonese and Mandarin at the same time? Some say that the 2 languages have different grammar and sound from one another, so I was curious if it could be possible to learn them both. I want to learn Mandarin, because I’m currently studying to be come a business/finance/accounting major. I also wish to learn Cantonese due to large a Chinese American community that speaks Cantonese around my area. I’ve made friends with a couple of Cantonese speakers, so practice speaking with someone will be a piece of cake. I wish to hear your responses.
I’ve studied both… Personally I feel the pain of this when reading Mandarin. If studying both it’s generally worth knowing how to pronounce each character/word in both Mandarin and Cantonese (even if a word wouldn’t likely be used in spoken Cantonese). So for each word not only do I feel the need to spend the extra time/labor to know the pronunciation in both languages, but there is also potential for confusion because the pronunciations, while different, are still related, because they descend from a common origin. That’s not fun for me so I don’t do it.
I focus on Cantonese, but I primarily read Mandarin, just using the Cantonese pronunciations of the characters when I read. I’ll listen to the Mandarin audio but if it doesn’t stick I don’t worry about it.
Personally I would suggest you to focus on Mandarin first. As a native speaker of both Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese ( In Kuala Lumpur, majority of the people speak Cantonese as a patois, although I speak Hakka a lot, I learn Cantonese through listening to native speakers of Cantonese and Hong kong’s drama), I would say that as long as you can understand and get familiar with Mandarin, for sure you can be familiar with Cantonese easily, due to the fact that the grammar patterns of Mandarin and Cantonese are almost the same. Besides, nowadays lots of Cantonese materials would be written in Mandarin, so getting an understanding in Cantonese materials would not be a problem for people who understand Mandarin. The main difficulty is that the pronunciation of both languages are quite different ( I would say the tone). However, if your listening skill in Mandarin is good, then you will notice that some of the words have similar pronunciation, you only require to spend some time in order to get familiar with the pronunciation. Those are my two cents. Good luck to your language learning journey.
Sorry for the late reply. I hope you can forgive me.
I’ll take your advice on starting with Mandarin first. I will go through the FSI Mandarin Chinese course, which It should be a very thorough course on the basics of the language. I have a small question about the tones. I have heard that some people confuse the second(Rising) tone and third(falling-Rising) tone. Is there a similarity between the two tones, and are there any tips or tricks to tell apart from one another?
In books they all say the the third tone is (falling-rising), it really isn’t when combined with other syllables. In effect it’s actually usually pronounced as a low “flat/first tone.” So in 你们, the 你 is pronounced as a flat low tone and then the 们 brings it upwards(rises).
And ya anyways about the dialect business, I would say try getting an intermediate hang of Mandarin before trying to fully indulge in any other dialects. Other than basic vocabulary, Cantonese and Mandarin words are mostly cognates, and there are many sound correspondences/patterns that recurr between the two.
