Quote:
Originally Posted by jchen
Most Chinese speak Mandarin. There are many ethnic groups, however ....
my mom can speak "Suzhou" hua and she can speak Putonghua too.  |
You're suzhounese? Me too! (Well half, my dad is Hong-Kongnese).
Yeah, I can understand Suzhounese, but not too well, and can barely speak it at all. I'm fluent in Mandarin though (Don't even get me started on Cantonese).
Anyways, I think the "now banned user" was talking about "dialects" of Chinese, not dialects of Mandarin, as Mandarin itself is a dialect of Chinese. If that is what she was talking about, yes, it is very hard to mutually understand different Chinese "dialects". In the North, "dialects" are relatively similar, but in the South, the closest two you would get are probably Suzhounese and Shanghainese, which are almost identical but still have subtle differences. Apart from that, most southern dialects are radically different.