Just a short introduction to languages used in China.
Mandarin is standard chinese, which is developed through Beijing accent. Cantonese is a province language, mainly in Canton province, Hongkong is part of Canton before. Different province has different local language, there are more than 100 languages in China. Apart from the general Chinese, there are 10 millions people speaking the original Turksh, 6 million Mongolians speaking Mongolian, also 2 million Chinese Korean speaking traditional Korean and so on. But we all understand mandarin. In terms of formal wrting, all language are with the same grammar with same character. Pronunciation is quite different.
Some neighbour countries of China, for example, Japanese has some similarities with Chinese, without learning Japanese, I can understand about 40% of Japanese document (writing). I dont know much about Korean language, but I have seen some koreans majoring in History in Taiwan doing language study, they told me they have to learn Chinese then to learn the original document of Korea history books, I guess maybe some similarities are there between Chinese and original Korean language.
I think Indians can understand this situation better, mandarin performs as standard language in China, like Hindi or English in India. Also Indians have many language within, the same to China but Indian languages are more diverse.
For koreans, a small country many be not that diverse. Compare N. Korea and S. Korea may show some difference.
Mandarin is standard chinese, which is developed through Beijing accent. Cantonese is a province language, mainly in Canton province, Hongkong is part of Canton before. Different province has different local language, there are more than 100 languages in China. Apart from the general Chinese, there are 10 millions people speaking the original Turksh, 6 million Mongolians speaking Mongolian, also 2 million Chinese Korean speaking traditional Korean and so on. But we all understand mandarin. In terms of formal wrting, all language are with the same grammar with same character. Pronunciation is quite different.
Some neighbour countries of China, for example, Japanese has some similarities with Chinese, without learning Japanese, I can understand about 40% of Japanese document (writing). I dont know much about Korean language, but I have seen some koreans majoring in History in Taiwan doing language study, they told me they have to learn Chinese then to learn the original document of Korea history books, I guess maybe some similarities are there between Chinese and original Korean language.
I think Indians can understand this situation better, mandarin performs as standard language in China, like Hindi or English in India. Also Indians have many language within, the same to China but Indian languages are more diverse.
For koreans, a small country many be not that diverse. Compare N. Korea and S. Korea may show some difference.