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Comment by dvduval | Hacker News Reader

Some languages like Chinese have a large corpus of information that can be studied, and there has been a continuous effort to standardize the language. it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be easier than English. I would expect it would be more difficult when you're talking about languages that have regional differences in usage of words, perhaps northern Vietnamese vs. Southern Vietnamese, or the Spanish of Spain versus the Spanish of Mexico.

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Chinese has large regional differences, too. Cantonese has different grammar, not just word usage. Modern Chinese grammar is somewhat similar to English while Cantonese follows ancient Chinese, which places verb to the end of sentence.

True, and Mandarin would be the better word to use here. Mandarin and Cantonese are for all intents and purposes separate languages. They are more different than English and Spanish.

If we're going down that path, then it should more specifically be Standard Mandarin, since Standard Mandarin and e.g. Southwestern Mandarin are only partially mutually intelligible like French and Spanish are partially mutually intelligible.

Chinese is the written language, based on Mandarin. Mandarin and Cantonese are separate, though closely related, spoken languages. They're a lot closer to each other than English and Spanish (more like French and Spanish), which is why the same written language works for both sets of speakers: most of the vocabulary is shared.

This is only because almost all native Cantonese speakers are trained to read and write in Standard Chinese from the very beginning.

Standard Chinese can be spoken in Cantonese, but while understandable, it is never done, in contrast to Mandarin.

In recent years written online conversations (like blogs, Facebook posts, instant messages) by Cantonese speakers are increasingly written in Cantonese instead, and this is slowly spreading to more "formal" media such as books.

Source: I'm a native Cantonese speaker.

Yes, it seems I underestimated the difference: "In spoken Cantonese the frequency of use of Cantonese dialect words is close to 50 percent (Li, et. al., 1995, p236)." (from https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P98-2238.pdf).

They're still a lot closer than English and Spanish or even French and Spanish (https://www.ezglot.com/most-similar-languages.php).

Cantonese is, like English and Mandarin, SVO.

E.g. I bought this book: ngóh(S) maáihjó(V) nìbún syù(O).

Contrast with Japanese: watashi wa(S) kono hon o(O) kaimashita(V).

Differences from Mandarin Grammar are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_grammar#Differences_...

Classical Chinese is also SVO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese_grammar

All language has significant regional difference if it covers enough regions

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