There is a lot I don't understand about China but have been too embarrassed to ask my friends/ co-workers, here in Canada. Hopefully someone here can answer them because I'm genuinely curious.
1) I have two friends, one from Taiwan another from mainland China who speak English amongst themselves. They said they have trouble understanding each other. Why?
2) I heard the answer for my first question is that they probably speak different dialects. If that is so, then how do Chinese actors communicate amongst each other?
3) Is Cantonese spoken only in Hong Kong and Mandarin elsewhere? Are they two separate languages?
4) Why do some Chinese have English names and others don't? Seems like people from Taiwan and Hong Kong are more likely to have English names. Why?
5) Why do C-dramas have subtitles in Chinese script?
6) What is the difference between simplified and traditional Chinese. I heard Chinese script is already difficult to learn because there are thousands of characters. Do they have to learn two versions on top of this?
7) How are Hanja, Kanji related to Chinese? Do the characters have the same meaning in all languages?
Sorry for the long list, I was just going to ask a few but then more and more questions came up.
I will try to answer some of these for you. I don't speak any Chinese languages, but I do know some things about them.
1. Yes, they speak in different dialects. If you watch a Taiwanese drama and then a mainland drama, you can hear the very obvious differences. Taiwanese also uses a lot of Native words and sounds in the language. Though both are similar, you can really tell the differences and they sound like two completely different languages.
2. In China, Mandarin is the official language so most people speak it. They are taught from a very early age, even if Mandarin dialect isn't their first language. China implemented this because there are so many different dialects/languages there.
3. Cantonese is spoken in the southern region of China. That includes Hong Kong and Guangdong. Guangdong used to be called 'Canton'. Mandarin is spoken in the mainland, mainly in the north and south west, though because it is the official Chinese language, it is taught throughout China and most people speak it. There are many other dialects spoken in China. Those are not the only two, just the two that are most spoken. They are categorized as seperate dialects, but they might as well be completely different languages, because they sound so vastly different.
4. Having English names dates back to Shanghai and Hong Hong pre WWII. Hong Kong was a British colony, so English was an official language there. Many Hong Kong Chinese adopted English names, though most were actually named traditional Chinese names. Before the Japanese occupation of China, Shanghai was a major international city, with different national districts making it up. Along the same premise as mentioned above, many adopted an English name, especially if they worked for a British company or family.
5. Chinese dramas have subtitles so that speakers of other dialects can understand. Dubbing is very popular, too.
6. I tried to learn Chinese and chose traditional as my system. LOL I learned very quickly why simplified was invented. Haha! Simplified system was created during Mao's time and was introduced to make reading and writing easier for everyone. It is still rather complicated, but generally use less strokes to write. In the Mainland, Simplified is the offical writing system. Taiwan still uses Traditional as their official system.
7. The characters in the Japanese alphabet are the same because China invented the written characters. There was a time when most of Asia used the Chinese writing system. It was even used in Korea before Hangul was invented. As for if they have the same meaning, that is something someone else will have to answer, since I don't speak either language. My interest is the phonetics of different languages, so I can answer about sounds and tone but not about meanings and definitions of words. Hope someone can help with that one. :)
I just wanted to add on to the Taiwanese dialect thing- My second uncle's wife is from Taiwan. I don't speak Taiwanese, only Mandarin, but I can understand her perfectly fine when she speaks Taiwanese. But for some other people, it may be harder to interpret what people are saying in Taiwanese because of the different accent used. Taiwan still uses traditional Chinese characters, but as CherryBunny mentioned, simplified Chinese was adopted after the Communists took over China. What do you think is easier to write, 面 or 麵? (obviously the first one, which is simplified Chinese) The majority of the senior population does fully understand the traditional system because they were taught it when they were children, so traditional Chinese is still used in mainland China but is seldom used.
As for the relation between Japanese and Chinese characters, I do believe that most of the characters mean the same thing in both languages. (I don't understand Japanese) I've seen some of the titles for a few J-dramas, and the original title, the Japanese one, contains a few Chinese characters with the meanings matching up to the English title. This is a great advantage to both Chinese and Japanese during traveling, because they will be able to understand the characters even if it is not their language. (For example, I can still understand the Japanese signs at airports, even if some of the characters did not originate from China)
I speak Cantonese, but my husband speaks Mandarin. When he tries to speak Cantonese, I can still figure out what he is saying. But when I speak Mandarin he always has trouble understanding me.
Some Chinese dialects are similar, so you can still understand it. However when I'm watching dramas, I prefer having the Chinese subtitles to read because I feel like they speak too fast and I only understand half of what they say. Also, for learning Chinese, the tones are important to the meaning.
The Japanese characters may be similar, but not entirely the same as the Chinese characters. It was why I ended up giving up learning Japanese. The similarity confused me and made it hard to learn. Chinese characters are difficult because you have to learn each individual character. One time I didn't know how to write a character and asked my husband. Then I tried to look up the character in a Chinese dictionary. I couldn't find it and he later told me he accidentally wrote it in Japanese instead.
Simplified Chinese is easier to learn, but the traditional Chinese characters hold more meaning and are easier to figure out the meaning. Also the same simplified Chinese character can be used to represent more than one traditional Chinese character, making it hard to figure out which meaning it is.
