Every few months someone emails us asking whether they should learn Mandarin or Cantonese. Usually they frame it as a question about difficulty, or about which is more "correct." The answer is almost never about either of those things. It's about geography and who you're actually going to be talking to.

Mandarin and Cantonese are not dialects of the same language in any way that makes them mutually intelligible — a Cantonese speaker and a Mandarin speaker cannot generally understand each other in conversation. They share a large written vocabulary (using Chinese characters), but the pronunciation, grammar, and spoken vocabulary differ substantially. Learning one does not get you halfway to the other.

Where Mandarin is used

Mandarin (Putonghua in mainland China, Guoyu in Taiwan) is the official spoken language of mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore. It's the language of education, media and government across all of mainland China, regardless of what regional languages people may also speak at home. If you're working with Chinese companies based in cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen or Chengdu, Mandarin is the relevant language. The same applies to most business contexts in Singapore and Taiwan.

With roughly a billion speakers, Mandarin has by far the wider reach. For professional purposes, it's the default unless your situation specifically points elsewhere.

Where Cantonese is used

Cantonese is the dominant spoken language in Hong Kong and the Guangdong province of southern China (including Guangzhou). It's also widely spoken among Chinese diaspora communities globally — many diaspora families that settled in Europe, North America or Australia in earlier decades came from Guangdong, so Cantonese has a strong presence in Chinese communities in cities like Amsterdam, London and New York.

If your context is specifically Hong Kong, or if you have family connections to Guangdong or the diaspora communities I've described, Cantonese may be the more personal choice. For most professional contexts in mainland China, it won't serve you as well — many people in Guangdong speak both, but meetings, written communication and anything formal defaults to Mandarin.

The character writing overlap

One thing worth knowing: if you learn to read Chinese characters in Mandarin, a significant portion of that reading ability transfers when you encounter Cantonese text. Written Cantonese often uses the same characters as written Mandarin, especially in formal contexts. The spoken pronunciation is different, but the visual form is familiar. This is probably the most practically useful overlap between the two languages for a European learner.

What we teach, and why

We teach Mandarin. Our student base is primarily Dutch professionals with connections to mainland China, and Mandarin is what serves them. If someone comes to us specifically for Hong Kong or Cantonese diaspora reasons, we'll say so clearly and we won't be the right school for that. We'd rather be honest about that than keep a student and teach the wrong thing.

Related reading

Why tones trip up Dutch speakers  —  Chinese in business meetings at A1 level