Mandarin vs. Cantonese orthography
I have a general question for Chinese experts here. When I studied Mandarin in college, it was strongly implied that my learning simplified hanzi would enable me to interpret a great deal of written Cantonese as long as it also used the simplified forms. I have still never studied Cantonese and thus have yet to test this myself. In any case, I suspect that I was misinformed; after all:
1) In Hong Kong, don't they still use the traditional characters? And I'm not clear on which language is officially employed there, now that HK is part of the PRC again. Where else would anyone write Cantonese with simplified hanzi?
2) Wikipedia + some person I remember speaking to at some point (lol vagueness) have told me that various disyllabic Mandarin words, when rendered in hanzi, make absolutely no sense to say aloud in Cantonese.
3) Wikipedia also indicates that Cantonese is less morphologically analytic than Mandarin, so I've guessed there must be hanzi combinations in Cantonese that you could never see in any other language.
4) Finally, Wikipedia indicates that Cantonese speakers have even created their own characters, for which using a Mandarin-focused dictionary would be utterly useless.
So, has Wikipedia served me well on this? 'cause at this point I want to avoid recommending to people that they study hanzi through a Mandarin-learning method if they want to learn hanzi for Cantonese.
多谢!
1) In Hong Kong, don't they still use the traditional characters? And I'm not clear on which language is officially employed there, now that HK is part of the PRC again. Where else would anyone write Cantonese with simplified hanzi?
2) Wikipedia + some person I remember speaking to at some point (lol vagueness) have told me that various disyllabic Mandarin words, when rendered in hanzi, make absolutely no sense to say aloud in Cantonese.
3) Wikipedia also indicates that Cantonese is less morphologically analytic than Mandarin, so I've guessed there must be hanzi combinations in Cantonese that you could never see in any other language.
4) Finally, Wikipedia indicates that Cantonese speakers have even created their own characters, for which using a Mandarin-focused dictionary would be utterly useless.
So, has Wikipedia served me well on this? 'cause at this point I want to avoid recommending to people that they study hanzi through a Mandarin-learning method if they want to learn hanzi for Cantonese.
多谢!