How hard is it to learn Cantonese if you already speak Mandarin (non-natively)?

My first language is English, I learned Mandarin all the way through high school, and I live in a Cantonese/English speaking household.

I feel like in my country, among the younger generation, there are a few stages of knowing your family's dialect:

Stage 1: The dialect is your first language; you're very fluent in it.

Stage 2: The dialect is not your first language; however, you did learn it through talking with your family so you know how to use it.

Stage 3: The dialect is not your first language; your parents never spoke to you using the dialect. However, you are exposed to it as your parents still speak to each other using the dialect, and most of your older relatives do as well. You are caught in a weird limbo of understanding the dialect but barely being able to speak it due to lack of actual usage.

Stage 4: The dialect is not your first language; your parents never spoke to you using the dialect, nor do they often speak to each other using the dialect. You don't really understand the dialect at all.

My family has two main dialects: Cantonese and Hokkien. I'm a severe stage 3 for Hokkien, i.e. I can understand it but can hardly speak it at all; and I'm a minor stage 3 for Cantonese, i.e. I can understand it and can speak it for basic things. The best way I can describe it is that I can say most things you'd find in a Cantonese language tourist handbook. Even then, probably not the whole handbook.

The weird part is that I can understand it. I have one aunt who insists on speaking to me in Cantonese/Hokkien to help me brush up on my dialect, and we often have long conversations with her speaking C/H and me replying in Mandarin/English.

Mandarin and Cantonese have a funny relationship; they're simultaneously so similar and so different at the same time.

Here are some examples for comparison (Mandarin on left, Cantonese on right):

你好吗 ni hao ma / lei hou mo (How are you?)

祝你生日快乐 zhu ni sheng ri kuai le / zhuk lei sang yat fai louk (Wishing you a happy birthday!)

你做什么 ni zuo shen me / lei zou mat ye (What are you doing?)

走快一点 zou kuai yi dian / zao fai yat di (Walk a little faster.)

你今天去哪里 ni jin tian qu na li / lei gum tin hei bin dou (Where are you going today?)

Some words sound really alike: 一点 (yi dian / yat di)

Some sound really different: 哪里 (na li / bin dou)

(Edit: At first I put 快乐 (kuai le / fai louk), but then I realized that they actually sound alike. Note the "ai" in the first words, and the "luh" sound in the 2nd words.)

Mostly the syllables are the same.

So knowing Mandarin helps in two parts:

• You'll already know the grammar, sentence structure, and all that stuff. You just have to fill it in with a different set of vocabulary.
• The vocabulary practically has an identical set of syllables and in some cases the words even sound alike. The syllables thing might sound irrelevant, but I personally feel that it helps lend a familiar rhythm to the language.

Imagine if you had to learn a language that had the EXACT same grammar structure as English, just different vocabulary. To some extent, you'll consider yourself as already knowing that language, just that you haven't bothered to memorize the vocabulary. To me, this is what learning Cantonese is like if you already know Mandarin.

If you surround yourself with enough Cantonese audio, you should be able to understand Cantonese quite quickly. Speaking, however, is an entirely different matter.

Case in point, I'm practically residing in an optimal Cantonese learning environment, yet I can barely say more than the most basic sentences. Mostly because I'm self-conscious of my Cantonese, so I only use it when I really have to, e.g. interacting with shop keepers.

Learning Mandarin won't help you to speak Cantonese better in terms of accent and pronunciation, in fact, it can make you do the exact opposite. Even though their syllables are the same, their intonations are completely different! This is why it is quite common that people who mostly speak Mandarin will have funny sounding Cantonese and vice versa.

As for me, I mostly speak English so both my Mandarin and Cantonese sound funny. Ha!

The difficulty of learning Cantonese when one already knows Mandarin will really depend on the individual and how much initiative he/she is willing to take, but I would say it's relatively easy when compared to learning a whole other language. You've already got the hard part nailed down (grammar), and compared to other dialects, Cantonese shares a lot of similar sounding vocab with Mandarin. Now you just have to get used to the not-so-similar sounding ones.

Note: I'm sorry if there are any mistakes in the Cantonese 'pronunciations' I wrote down. I just wrote it how I normally hear it spoken.

In a nutshell, not very hard.

However, let me clarify by saying this: technically, it’s not very hard. By “technically”, I mean things like phonology, syntax, vocabulary. If you know a few Cantonese specific words, you’ll find that opens up a new world of communication, and if you know sounds map between between Cantonese and Mandarin, it’s a jiffy to learn Cantonese.

If you’d like a more detailed idea of what “learning Cantonese” entails, you can check out a guide I’ve written on learning Cantonese I wrote:

The Complete Guide to Learn Cantonese 【廣東話學習指南】

That said, let me share some experiences I had tutoring Mandarin students learning Cantonese, and their difficulties in learning Cantonese:

1. Not willing to speak out loud. This is the biggest issue. I was actually quite taken aback by some of the native Mandarin speakers I’ve worked with in the past, who literally understood everything spoken in Cantonese, but couldn’t speak, and who’re unwilling to speak. Can you imagine being able to understand a completely foreign language, but yet not be able to speak? The capability is there, but if one isn’t willing to actually start using it, it’s really a huge shame.
2. Distinguishing between tones 3 and 6, and 6 and 4. This is usually the hardest tone issue when listening. Because they’re very close, it’s quite difficult for Mandarin speakers to distinguish these in the beginning - they’re also non-existent tones in Mandarin.
3. Difficulty with replicating tone 5. The fifth tone is always the challenging tone for Mandarin speakers. Tone 2 in Cantonese is a direct equivalent to tone 2 in Mandarin, but there’s no such equivalent for tone 5. As a result, because they’re both rising tones, if one isn’t careful, the Mandarin learner easily defaults to going back to tone 2.
4. Cantonese particles. Without a doubt, this is the most difficult area to grasp. To date, I’ve never heard of any foreigner, Mandarin or non-Mandarin speaking, who’s been able to grasp particles correctly. Does that mean they’re that difficult to learn? No, it’s possible to grasp them very accurately, but there are hardly any materials designed to tackle just particles.
5. Getting used to Cantonese speech patterns. Some Cantonese speakers (and I don’t mean to criticize our own people) have the tendency to say many things that don’t mean any thing when they can’t think of something meaningful to say. This means lots of filler words, redundancy, entire sections of speech that has no meaning. Mandarin learners tend to get lost in a myriad of this. (Again, not criticizing ourselves, it’s just a pattern of discourse I haven’t heard in other languages before.)

There are some other issues as well, like Cantonese colloquialisms, but generally, if you’re advanced enough to pick out those colloquialisms, you can understand enough to deduce the overall sentiment of the speaker, even if you don’t necessarily understand what they’re getting at precisely.

Now, I’d like to touch a little more on the above list. If you were to hazard a guess, which factor do you think is the biggest obstacle in learning Cantonese for Mandarin speakers?

If you guessed #1, you’re absolutely right.

The fact of the matter is that, while Cantonese is one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world (or so they say, I think it’s rather straightforward, even after taking away my bias as a native speaker), it’s probably one of the easiest to learn for Mandarin speakers. Chinese people learning other Chinese languages is not that difficult.

However, I will, as a part of our society, admit that sometimes, we can be intolerant of funny accents. This is in stark contrast with my experiences speaking English, Mandarin, French, Japanese and Korean with native speakers - I speak these languages decently (in terms of pronunciation), but the accent is there. However, I’ve never, not once, been ridiculed because of my accent.

But in Hong Kong, if you speak Cantonese with a slight accent, this is enough grounds to elicit frowns and ostracization. I think this is further fuelled by anti-mainland sentiment in recent years, but this has gone on for as long as I remember, even when I was a kid.

(I still vividly remember passing by a video store as a kid, seeing a scene when Cantonese in-laws were meeting with the fiancée who comes from China, who speaks Cantonese with an accent. The setting was in a cha-caan-teng, a Cantonese restaurant, and the soon-to-be-wife ordered

• “一杯奶茶，一杯凍檸水”, which is supposed to be “jat1 bui1 naai5 caa4, jat1 bui1 dong3 ning2 seoi2” (a milk tea, a lemonade), but she turned it into
• “一杯奶茶，一杯凍檸死”, “jat1 bui1 laai1 caa4, jat1 bui1 dong3 ning2 sei2”, or a milk tea (wrong pronunciation), and a cup of “lemon death”.

I know it’s comedy, but that sort of thing makes me uncomfortable and is indicative of the things we’re willing to poke fun at.)

I personally think we should be more tolerant as a society towards foreigners learning Cantonese, Chinese or no Chinese, but it would seem that in general, because there are so few foreigners who choose to learn Cantonese anyway, and out of those who do, very few emerge truly proficient in the language, we usually tend to be a bit dismissive of their efforts, and quickly switch to Mandarin or English, depending on whom we’re talking to.

So, it might come as a surprise to some to hear this, but I don’t think Cantonese is all that hard to learn for Mandarin for the aforementioned reasons. However, I do think that the conditions surrounding our language make it hard for foreigners to truly embrace it, which is why, even though I tend to be frustrated by Mandarin speakers who understand Cantonese but have inhibitions speaking it, after that initial wave of impatience, I calm down and come to an understanding - it’s because we’re not always all that open to foreigners speaking Cantonese.

*Just to clarify, to native Cantonese speakers, especially Hongkongers, reading this answer, I don’t believe everyone is like that. But from what I’ve personally seen and observed, from this side of the fence, one might say, it’s enough to elicit this trepidation among foreigners who’re trying, really trying and making an effort to learn Cantonese.

Just my honest opinion.

I think Taiwanese may be slightly more difficult to learn than Cantonese, so perhaps the difficulty level may not be quite so great. After I had become fairly fluent in Mandarin I decided to try to learn Taiwanese. I didn’t devote enough time to it, and nobody who spoke Mandarin would take the trouble to converse in Taiwanese with a rank beginner.

I never got good at Taiwanese. I learned Mandarin only because I lived with a Chinese family and avoided speaking English. I could have found the same situation with some of the older Taiwanese who never learned Mandarin, but then I would have needed to leave the vicinity of the university, the library, and other research items that I might need.

One of the problems with Taiwanese is having 8 tones and tone sandhi.

Having some sort of background with Mandarin may be useful in learning Cantonese, it may make absolutely no difference. The reason I say this is because most Mandarin learners use simplified Chinese, the tones are much more complicated in Cantonese, and if you want to learn Cantonese in a very all ground manner, standard written Chinese is one part of the writing/reading aspect. There's still written Cantonese, a lot of which are adapted to fit Cantonese and do not exist in standard written form.

Mandarin isn't by any means a bridge into other Chinese languages (often derogatively and incorrectly called “dialects” which implies mutual intelligibility).

Probably the main difficulty will be that no one speaks Cantonese the way standard Chinese is written. Mandarin is exactly the way standard Chinese is written. If you read standard Chinese in Cantonese, yeah it makes sense, just be warned that no one speaks like that and if you tried to speak Cantonese that way in Hong Kong, you will absolutely be given strange looks.

It’s been a time since this questions was posted, but assuming that people still find this via Google I just put my very late answer here:

I’m also in the situation that I’m already fluent in Mandarin and now want to learn Cantonese. Been living in Hong Kong now for 3 years but my Cantonese still hasn’t really progressed a lot as I’m in an international setting most of the time. For my own learning I quickly got frustrated with the material out there so I started putting together a vocabulary book with the 2000 most commonly used words & phrases ordered by frequency of use. You can find the link to the book in the comment to Richard’s answer.

Furthermore, I’ve put together a quick list of what helped me with learning Cantonese and other ways you can make progress (like language classes, etc.). You can find the article here: How to learn Cantonese from Mandarin | Pinhok Languages

Would be great if other people reading this could continue share their experiences. With more and more foreigners speaking Mandarin I think this questions will become more and more important in the future I think!

I think it is not so easy for some native mandarin speakers either lol (not speaking for all).

A lot of Chinese people do have said that Cantonese and Mandarin are like two completely different languages while some stands for the opposite.

Many of my friends have asked me to teach them Cantonese but it seems really hard for them to get the tones right sometimes. I could tell that they really tried but the way they sounded was often a bit weird to a native speaker’s ears.

I guess it is because they are used to the four tones in Mandarin so it could be hard for them to get used to the “extra” tones in Cantonese. Also, sometimes there are some of my friends who just can’t pronounce some words in Cantonese like “香”（xiang as in hong for Hong Kong）and “梁” (liang as in a Chinese last name).

However, there are some words that sound very familiar in these two languages indeed. Plus, we use the same characters (not all in the same meanings tho). So…maybe it is not that hard I guess?

I should say, learning to understand Cantonese is quite easy, but speaking is another thing.

My first language is Mandarin and I haven’t learned any southern dialect except Cantonese. I started learning Cantonese in 2008. At that time, I had no friends or relatives who speak Cantonese. So I kept watching TV drama, news and programs, listening and singing Cantonese songs as much I can to learn. At first, it took me about 3 days to start to understand a little.

After learning 3 years, I traveled to HK, I found that I could understand most sentences that people talk and almost all the words posted on their newspaper. Since then, I tried to write my posts in social media in Cantonese.

3 years later, I moved to Macau and spent 4 years there until now. I found that it is still difficult for me to pronounce some certain words. And sometimes when I try to say a word, my pronunciation seems different from what I want to pronounce.

Actually learning Chinese and able to speak Chinese isn’t very hard. A few tips below will help improve your Chinese skills step by step.

– You need to find a motive why you want to learn Chinese, and how long, how often you speak Chinese? E.g. : My colleague wanted to be a part time translator so he signed up for a Chinese course. My student had a Chinese girl friend and wanted to communicate with her and her parent in Asia. It all depends what motivates you to learn Chinese and always remember your motive.

– Use 20 minutes a day, to learn new words and practice the previous chapter, pronounce it out loud so you’ll remember them.

– Find a local group, or friends who are able to speak Chinese, go out with them more often and learn from them. You need a partner so you can improve your oral skills.

– Learn to speak and understand Chinese is easy, but writing and pronounce it accurately would be the harder part.

– There’s no faster way to master Chinese Language, because it has totally no connection with French, Italian or Spanish. Chinese characters itself has more than 3000 kinds of it and each has its own meaning. Combining 2 character will form another meaning.