Itâs good to remind ourselves of its many different uses, especially on those days when getting students to participate feels like pulling hensâ teeth. 1  Participation adds interest âItâs hard to maintain studentsâ focus and attention when all they hear is the professor talking.
Best Answer: Unless they are bi-lingual, they can barely understand each other. I frequent Hong Kong almost every month, the locals who have lived in Hong Kong all their life and mainly spoke cantonese cannot speak / understand mandarin. And for Mainlanders who goes to Hong Kong, they usually have a hard time understanding the cantonese. Some neighboring cities of Hong Kong like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, where cantonese are spoken a lot, the locals can sometimes be bi-lingual in mandarin and cantonese.
Mandarin Chinese has four tones, but other Chinese languages have more. Yue (Cantonese), for example, has nine tones. The difference in tonal systems is another reason why the different forms of Chinese are mutually unintelligible and are considered by many as separate languages.