Chinese languages and dialects comparison 中國方言對比- Mandarin ,Cantonese, Wu, Hokkien, Hakka 

if alot of 'shurrr' its mandarin if alot of 'ah', its wu

Being a Malaysian Chinese. I'm glad my country has cantonese, hakka, hokkien, teowchew, hainan and foochew community all in close proximity. I can understand 4 out of the 6 dialects. Basically i'm a Hakka living in a hokkien community, married a teowchew girl, watch cantonese drama since small. Our national language is Malay. And here everyone from the Chinese community able to speak Mandarin fluently too

As a Korean, I don't know anything anyone is saying but as for pronunciation, Hakka sounds the closest to Sino-Korean words.

Can't call them dialects to be honest. They are very different from one another. It's not like Australian English vs British Queen's English vs American English... you get the point. I think it's easier for Italian to understand Spanish than for a Cantonese speaker to understand Mandarin.

Mandarin = Northern China Cantonese = Southeastern China Wu = Eastern China Hokkien = Southeastern China Hakka = Southeastern China

cantonese sounds like a very stress inducing language.

Cantonese is so different sounding to Mandarin. Wu sounds like someone trying to fake a Mandarin accent. Hokkien sounds like a mashup of Canto and Mando. Hakka sounds like someone trying to fake a Canto accent. Just my observation from a non Chinese speaking person. LOL.

Hakka and Wu dialects sound soft and comfortable

I love Cantonese and I’m Vietnamese, southern Vietnamese to be exact. It sounds just like the dialects I speak. Upbeat and ghetto like, maybe I watched too much Hong Kong movies growing up lol

I think I prefer Wu, but maybe I’m biased because the video shows a pretty woman talking playfully for its sample of Wu.

Being an American, having grown up in the upper-midwest (Minnesota) and after living in San Francisco for a number of years, my impression, of course, says more about me and the culture I grew up in than then any intrinsic characteristics of the dialects. Mandarin: cool, sophisticated, learned, balanced, but also distant and somewhat unfriendly. Probably because this is the dialect spoken by most Chinese university students and those recently in country for business and also because it's the official language of government and mass media. Cantonese: emotional, passionate, rustic, aggressive, adventuresome, fast-paced, chaotic, quarrelsome, inquisitive, opinionated, loud. For me (like many Americans) this is the language of Chinese cinema, the Hong Kong action movies. Also the language of most imported Chinese popular music (until recently). Immigrants from Hong Kong in the 60s-80s meant that this was the language of many recent immigrants, especially those starting families when I was growing up. Wu: soft, quiet, flowing, murmuring, friendly, relaxed, even. Min/Hokkien: Working man's language, haggling in shops, grandparents yelling at their grand kids, of smoking a cigarette, chatting outside an auto body shop while on break, homey, comfortable, unsophisticated, rural, language on the street, language of the elderly, simple, gossipy. Probably because this is one of the core language of SF Chinatown, especially of families that have lived in San Francisco many generations.

As an English and Sino-language speaker, I find that some simple short English sentences end up being much longer in Chinese. On the other hand, English sentences that have complex ideas can be summed up in just a few Chinese characters. It goes to show how interesting language learning can be.

Chinese people generally think Wu Chinese is the best to listen to, especially Suzhou dialect. We call it 吳侬軟語. Because it's the softest. And Suzhou is the most cultured and wealthiest city in China from 1400 to 1900.

In Malaysia there a lot of people who can speak like 3 or 4 dialects

I'm a Mexican who grew up in San Francisco and learned basic Cantonese. Before I learned Cantonese I used to think that it sounded terrible and loud, then I found out what a cool and fun language it was with so much slang and expressions. Never a dull moment speaking Cantonese.

All the Sino languages in this video sound me like music. I love all Sino languages. They're like treasures.

I live in Manila (Philippines) and the lady at 4:19 looks and sounds EXACTLY like all the nice old Chinese ladies you see at the mall

0:36 “Ar ar ar ar ar quiet now. Quite bullshit, Neiman”

I love Cantonese and I prefer it over Mandarin :)

I'm a Chinese,I can speak both Mandarin and Cantonese.

That was a lot of Chinese! It's hard trying to compare different speech from different situations, but judging from those clips I'd say Cantonese and Hakka sounded most pleasing to my ears. If I had to pick just one I'd go for Hakka.

As someone who can't understand a word they are saying Wu sounds the most pleasant. Mandarin and Hokkien sound harsh to my ears.

幹，都說客家話是晉代和宋代從北方難逃的漢人躲起來說的話，我還不信，覺得怎麼可能。結果今天聽了真的能聽出來北方官話的感覺，就是保留了多一點入聲。我感覺和同樣在北方但不屬於官話的晉語有點像！這回我信了。

I love my hometown language :Wu!

As a Shanghainese, I can speak Mandarin and Shanghainese(Wu). And I can understand 100% Mandarin and 90% Suzhou dialect (Wu) and 60% Cantonese.

hakka differs between regions (because hakka are actually the migrated people from central china to other parts of china). my grandpa who speaks the hopo variant of hakka speaks it really differently from the hakka presented here

Wu flows the best. It almost sounds like a subtle pitch accent language with polysyllabic words. Cantonese is the kind of Chinese language westerners know due to Kung fu movies, migration of Cantonese Chinese to the west, and Hong Kong and Macau. Min Hokkien is commonly used by the large oversea Chinese populations in Southeast Asia like in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand, and is the 2nd most most influential Chinese dialect after ancient Middle Chinese. Many words from Hokkien entered neighbouring Asian languages like Malay, Tagalog, Thai etc due to trade and intermarriage with Hokkien speaking Chinese merchants. Hakka is like a mix between Cantonese and Hokkien, with some small pre Mandarin influence due to their origins coming from the north and settling in the south and adopting their new language. Mandarin is the most divergent language, because it originated as the prestige language of the ethnically non -Han Chinese Mongols and Manchus when they occupied China, due to their lack of certain phonemes, it shows a lot of influence from their languages.

To learn mandarin well ....you can travel to any places in China..and communicate with local people, other dialects are hard to do this

Wu is the best for me xD

Mandarin has the prettiest sounds. But the writing, they are all beautiful 😊💗

There are so many types of Hakka. Some are very different from each other. Hokkien spoken here sounds very different from those spoken in Singapore.

Personally, Cantonese because I grew up speaking Cantonese, learned mandarin in Chinese school and understood some basic sentences. My mom speaks Cantonese, mandarin, Vietnamese and teochew. Mandarin, sounds standardized, might need to reeducate myself in mandarin in the future.

I never heard anyone speak Wu before. First time hearing what the dialect sounds like.

Suzhounese langauge sounds the most beautiful, sounds more poetic and scholarly than the other Chinese languages.

Cantonese really does sound like the "most Chinese" out of all the languages of China. It really makes some truly unique sounds. I'm willing to bet it is for sure the most ancient of all the Chinese languages. Either that or it came directly from it.

I like the mandarin and wu dialects. These two are, by far, the nicest and most pleasant sounding dialects out of all of them.

I'm from the Philippines. I have heard the proverb, used in the Hokkien part of the video, from elders. It's an important proverb to remember.

If you want to say anything about Chinese dialect, Malaysia has a tons of them especially Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka and Teochiew.

After listening I kind of see how other South East Asian languages can be similar to converse dialects. Cantonese has some Thai and Vietnamese sounding words with more ng or g sounds. The cadence and how sentences flow is similar (not the same though) Wu sounds similar to Korean. Hokkien and Hakka sounds similar to Vietnamese also. I speak Cantonese and Mandarin and these are just my quick observations regarding patterns of speech.

My aunt is Chinese-Malaysian. Aside from English and Malay, she also speaks Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese

The Hokkien speakers here sounds really like my grandparents from Jinjiang. Very different from my other grandparents from Xiamen.

I heard about the Cantonese dialect, but I didn’t know how it sounded before. I recently watched a movie where they spoke Cantonese. It was just a little like the usual Mandarin, which I heard often, but it sounded completely different to me. Since then, I became interested in this dialect, because it seemed pleasant to me.I know little about the Chinese language and its dialects, but even after watching this video and listening to the different dialects, I can say that Cantonese is the nicest,I really like it.I would like to speak it one day,but I think it's hard to learn it...

I'm learning Mandarin right now but I really like the sound of Cantonese

I am from Hong Kong so I speak both Mandarin and Cantonese and I still don't understand why people say that Cantonese is aggressive lmao

Cantonese and Wu sound awesome, would love to learn them. Even though you have to go through Mandarin apparently to learn any other one in the west! One of my students speaks Cantonese but he's not that keen to show me. Mandarin just so dry to my ear

Well as a native chinese.... I'm living in suzhou so i do speak Wu or suzhou dialect, but i do not understand cantonese or hakka or hokkien..... BUT it's actually very interesting that we as suzhou people, do understand the dialects of cities around suzhou such as Shanghai dialect, Hangzhou dialect or Wujiang dialect which are actually quite different from the suzhou dialect.....we just understand anyway..... AND just to add that even the Suzhou dialect can be separated further into the urban suzhou dialect and the countryside suzhou dialect..... which surprisingly we sometimes do not understand some meaning of the words......

i love Cantonese

I can speak 3 of them fluently: Mandarin, Shanghainese (dialect of Wu), and Cantonese. - Wu flows the best because the tone is smoother, and the pure vowels and nasalized vowels are easier to pronounce. I guess the hearer should feel the same. - A lot of the phonological features of Old Chinese is lost in Mandarin. If you knows Japanese or Korean plus another Southern Chinese language, you know what I mean. - Cantonese is great for singing, but in speech it sounds too "tonal" for me. In terms of information density per syllable: Cantonese > Mandarin > Shanghainese

That pitch accent is super noticeable in the Wu example

Now I get it. I could HEAR the difference but I didn't know which was which. Good examples and good video.

Seems that "tonal" languages let you convey lots of information very quickly. Is this true? Also, loving the "gucci" gramma shirt in the Hokkien segment.

There are some different tones between Quanzhou & Taiwanese

Cantonese is much more strong in pronounciation, sound similar to korean

Mandarin sounds the best to me. Very tonal and musical. Screw anybody who says that it doesn't sound good. It's a beautiful language.

竇文濤 speaks Mandarin very very well with a Beijing flavor, even though he's not from Beijing. The program is called 鏘鏘三人行.

I love hokkien minnan

The Hokkien one sounds like it's from Taiwan. I'm from Indonesia and our Hokkien is quite different (we also have a variety of Hokkien accents in Indonesia).

Why does Hakka sound likes it’s just Mandarin? I had assumed I wouldn’t understand Hakka. Knowing Mandarin, it’s very easy to follow along with what those women were saying by following the subtitles. They were just speaking Mandarin with slightly different pronunciations for some words.

As a native Chinese, I can only understand mandarin Chinese.==

3:11 Me looking fory homework in my back pack acting like I can't find it and forgot it at home knowing damn well I didn't do it.

I only understand Cantonese because I speak Cantonese Hakka. Now if your confused there are different types of Hakka like Malaysian Hakka and Cantonese Hakka. Random Fact: I'm also TeoChew. Lol

Hokkien language is what’s mostly spoken in Philippines in the Chinese community and Tagalog also has loanwords from the Hokkien Language

As a Cantonese speaker I can understand 100% Cantonese 97% mandarin (I learnt it in school but they are speaking in a really northern accent) 70% hakka (sounds like Cantonese with wrong tones and random twisted mandarin words) 30% Hokkien (just like Hakka but everything has weird twisted sounds and different tones) 20% Wu (Like mandarin but every single word is swapped out with something else)

exactly its not hokkien, in hokkien(fujian) have many dialects, almost can group to 5 families, in video we called it southern Min(闽Min is ancient name of Hokkien=Fujian) family, its include Xiamen Zhangzhou Quanzhou Teochew Chaoshan, etc. →→→→←←←← the other dialect families in hokkien is northern Min, eastern Min(like Fuzhou's dialect), Central Min and Po hsien those who called southern Min families as Hokkien just because many years ago, most of southern fujian immigrants telling people that they came from Fujian in dialect→hokkien. NOW, their descendants and mny uninformed people thought their dialect = hokkien

Wu is my favourite. Also the music playing briefly during Wu at 3:08 is called Naruto OST 2 - Fooling Mode.

i understand taiwanese speaking mandarin much easier than chinese speaking mandarin. the accent is very strong. my family dialect is moyanese. Hakka sounds close to taiwanese as well. I love the sound of it

Wu sounds like Mandarin mixed with Japanese, especially when the woman speaks it. I think Cantonese sounds the best though

Cantonese sounds the most beautiful and the most different from the others

They sound the same to me, except for cantonese

the Hokkien only represents the Quanzhou end of the spectrum, the Zhangzhou end sounds different (e.g. vowel change "i" to "u" in common syllables e.g. li -> lu 汝)

Hakka and Cantonese sounds like Thai and Vietnamese.

If you frequently watch hk movie, you will notice a difference between Mandarin and Cantonese

Cantonese is still the most beautiful Chinese language for me. It's the one I'm most exposed to because I often go to Hong Kong, and IMO it's the one we're most familiar with in the West.

I have sound-allergy for thai-sounding such as cantonese, hokkien and hakka (all though hakka is more balanced), mandarin is just easier for my ears. I've seen too many movies and dramas and that's why I prefer standard mandarin dialect or beejing cause the er-sound is pretty. The more poetic xu sounds the more I feel happy. I can't stand doi, ai, gO sounds. Never heard Wu before but I hear from this clip that I can understand some words with ease.

Haka and wu sounded the most soothing for me espeschially hakka ,mandarin last. What about whenzhounese?

There r also other Chinese dialects, e.g. Hainanese, Hockchew, Hockchia, Kenghwa, etc. Even Cantonese, I think there are two other sub groups, all because of the speaking tones.

所謂北京話也不過是當年滿清採用的官話。。真正本來廣泛，地道，傳統的，之前朝代使用的多是客家，蘇州，福建，廣東話之類的語系。。

There are a lot more variants. Southwestern and Northeastern dialects sounds like a twist of Mandarin but still very different. Cantonese and Hakka has a lot of regional accents that can sound very different given by which part of Southern China you live in. Chaoshan sounds like Hokkien but they couldn't understand each other. Wu is more like a group of local dialects spoken in Eastern China rather than a specific local language. Other than that, China has some regional languages that have their own writing language instead on Hanzi, such as Uyghur and Mongolian. I speak Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka, and I can still sometimes be confused by different accents from Cantonese and Hakka. While mainland China and Taiwan/Guangdong and Hong Kong both speaks Mandarin/Cantonese, the vocabulory we use for certain things might differ, quite like the ones you find between British English and American English.

I'm native Cantonese speaker and Hakka seems the most understandable to me although I think Wu dialect sounds the most pleasant.

well now I realise why I don't understand the chinese spoken in in the local market, they're cantonese and I can only understand mandarin. It also explains why they've got a funny accent.

Wu sounds so beautiful! =)

That Hokkien is fuzhou not southern min hokkien. Big difference, almost inteligible to hokkien speakers

Heh. I'm from NY (and I watched a lot of Jackie Chan movies growing up), so Cantonese is most familiar to my ear. Back in grad school, I roomed with someone from Beijing (Mandarin), and our next door neighbor was from Shanghai (Suzhou). They used to tease about each other's accents all the time. My roomie would say our neighbor sounded like an old-fashioned gangster (and let me tell you, a Mandarin Chinese speaker trying to put on a Cagney accent is HILARIOUS), and our neighbor would call her "professor" or "princess."

Native Hokkien here🤗 I also know Cantonese, Mandarin.

Hakka is my favorite 😏💛

Now i understand why almost every chinese video has subtitles.

Some Chinese Dialect have different origins, Fujian(Hokkien) dialect has some Austronesian origin, Cantonese has some Thai-Kadai language words, Some Northern Dialect has some Manchu and Turkish words. Some dialects were 2000 thousands years apart , and thousands kms apart

How i like chinese dialects (specially cantonese and mandarin, my favorites).

They all sound pretty similar to me, but I liked Mandarin and Hakka the most. In my opinion Mandarin has the most interesting sound, but Hakka is nicer, it doesn't have so many zh's and r's.

Yeah we can't even call them dialects, they're totally different languages. It's the same as saying French, English, German and Spanish are all dialects of the "European" language

Cantonese is so hard for me😭💀💔

Everytime i hear cantonese = stephen chow films lmao. Love all of his films.

As a Cantonese speaker, except for mandarin, among the other 3, without subtitles, I can pick up more words in Hakka, can somewhat understand around 40%?? Hokkien I can only pick up a few words Wu is completely unintelligible.

Hakka sounds nice

Hokkien when speaking fast sounds like Korean!

I think Wu sounded the best. Oddly, it was the least "Chinese" sounding out of the bunch. Are these basically all completely different langauges from different unrelated tribes who assimilated into Chinese society over time?

is wu dialect of suzhou and shanghai dialect the same?

Mandarin sounds quite harsh with all the "urr"s, "sh"s and "kh"s Cantonese - my mother tongue, is very interesting. On one hand you can make it sound soft and make you sound elegant, but on the contrary you can also sound very aggressive and rude in Cantonese. And Cantonese is also the best language to swear in 😂 Wu - Shanghainese is spoken by my dad and all my relatives on my dad's side, the Wu dialect sounds so soft, to the point where even the native speakers refer it as "soft dialect" Hokkien - it is very interesting, the cognates are so different from other dialects, hence is the hardest to understand. Overall another nice language to swear in, but like Cantonese, can also sound beautiful. Hakka - it's like a mix of all dialects, no matter what dialect you can speak, you can understand a little bit. Even though you may not know Hakka, it will be the easiest dialect to pick up(unless that is you speak Hokkien, then Teochew would be easier to pick up) It is also soft, but not as soft as Wu. and to be honest they are more like different languages if we are talking about the colloquial speech, but the formal speech is essentially more like different accents. It's a bit like an american listening to scottish english - you can't understand much, but when written you understand everything. The situation is quite complicated, some argue they are languages while others claim they are dialects. Feel free to express about what do you think(but i won't check lol)

Southern chinese looks like an mix of japanese with chinese language

Wu and Hakka sound beautiful