[zelse]

Re: Publishing in Mandarin, just in case you're curious:

Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Wu, etc are spoken languages (or dialects, or varieties), but the writing system is common to all of them, albeit in two major forms -- Simplified and Traditional. If I write 恭喜发财, a Mandarin speaker will read that aloud as gongxi facai, a Cantonese speaker as gung hei faat coi, and a Hokkien speaker as kiong-hi hoat-chai, though I left off tone markings even though they're important. In that sense, unless something's romanized, written materials are pretty much just written in 'Chinese', and not any particular variety.

Learning Chinese is funny that way: the spoken language has very simple, regular grammar, but then you also need to learn how to read, write, and pronounce ~3,000 characters to read a newspaper, with a well-educated reader in the language typically recognizing between 8 and 15 thousand characters of the 80,000-100,000 or so that have ever existed (including obscure characters, obsolete characters, regional characters, and variant characters).

It's similar to how if you show a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German and a Pole '456', they'll all know the meaning even if the Englishman thinks "four-hundred fifty-six", and the Frenchman thinks quatre cent cinquante-six.

[hnfong]

This is mostly true, but not exactly.

Most Chinese speakers can understand (written) Mandarin, but all the spoken languages can be written in theory. Mandarin was just the first one to have been popularly written and it was the official dialect, so it became the de-facto standard (before it became de jure).

People in Hong Kong for example have been writing Cantonese for decades, albeit more often recently than before. But if you looked you'd find published works written in Cantonese 100+ years ago. That said, if you only knew Mandarin it will probably only take you a couple days to get the hang of reading Cantonese since it's not that different when written.

[zelse]

Oh neat. Do these writings use Hanzi or something else?

[soundnote]

The writing is still fundamentally Mandarin, is it not? Hanzi just disconnect the writing somewhat from the sound of the individual language, and the languages are closely related enough that you can read written Mandarin reasonably easily as a speaker of other Chinese languages.

At least eg. Hannas - far from an impartial voice on the subject, mind - clearly distinguishes the written standard as a separate language from dialect speakers' native ones:

"By the same token, the 'unity' that Chinese characters allegedly impart to the language by allowing speakers of different 'dialects' to read a common written language turns out to be an illusion. These so-called Chinese dialects have less in common than the Romance languages of Europe, meaning that speakers of nonstandard Chinese (some 30 percent of the Han population) are not reading their own language or even a common language, but what is to them a Mandarin-based second language written in Chinese characters. Granted the characters allow non-Mandarin speak- ers to read segments of written Mandarin in their own regional pronuncia- tions. But, far from unifying Chinese, this practice only perpetuates differences that would have been leveled out long ago under the influence of a phonetic script."

— Hannas, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma, Ch.8, Appropriateness to East Asian Languages