Unorthodox Chinese. Alright, time for a proper rebuttal.
#HongKong govt leaders have often insisted that teaching Chinese in Mandarin in schools can improve students' Chinese - which is not true and not supported by any evidence. For one, Cantonese has a much longer history...
#HongKong govt leaders have often insisted that teaching Chinese in Mandarin in schools can improve students' Chinese - which is not true and not supported by any evidence. For one, Cantonese has a much longer history...
than mandarin (220AD vs Yuan Dynasty in 14th century China). The phonology of Cantonese is more similar to that of Middle Chinese, spoken in ancient China. E.g. Tang/Song poems sound better and rhyme when read in Cantonese, but not Mandarin, which has lost the entering tone.
In terms of vocabulary, it also retains more elements of Classical Chinese than Mandarin, so it's easier for a Cantonese speaker to read Classical Chinese (also given they're written in traditional Chinese characters).
The essence and beauty of Chinese is that one can capture the mood and express complicated thoughts in a very concise way. For example, if directly translated into English, 枯藤老樹昏鴉，小橋流水人家, a line from the poem 天净沙·秋思 would just be a group of random nouns,
but in Chinese, it paints a melancholic picture of a lonely traveller. This quality is lost in Mandarin these days, especially if you look at the diction of Chinese newspapers and textbooks, whose bureaucratic language is, tbh, poor Chinese.
So yes, Cantonese may be a colloquial language, but with a richer cultural history, it is also a more dynamic language with a lot of vocabulary that simply have no equivalent in mandarin (虢礫緙嘞, 山旮旯), and when incorporated into writing can make a piece more lively and fun.
