Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese. So Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, share the same character set (Chinese). There's also traditional vs simplified Chinese, technically; they're similar with some differences in how they're written. Japanese also has some differences which can be confusing because a lot of application developers just use the Chinese character sets for kanji: https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. Including the text makes it more accessible to a wider audience regardless of what "dialect" is spoken in the show.
thaumasiotes|2 years ago
This isn't really true; there are characters that are exclusive to one or the other, like 冇. The stronger political position of Mandarin means that its idiosyncratic characters are viewed as "real" while the idiosyncratic characters required by other languages aren't, but it's a fundamentally symmetric situation.
> One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another.
The written versions of the language are also that different. The subtitles are in Mandarin, which everyone must learn to read.
(How common are hard-coded subtitles in modern Chinese media? They're on the older stuff, but it seems like a lot of modern shows don't bother.)
msla|2 years ago