Hello all,

Well, I have more of general Chinese learning questions, and I don't who to turn to, so I thought I'd check with the Skritter community.

Like the majority here, I've been and still am learning Mandarin Chinese. I recently acquired some manga in chinese but it's a Hong-Kong version and not the Taiwan version that I was looking for. HK and Taiwan are both on the traditional system, so that's good. However, I remember one of my professor once showed us a short comic strip from HK, with characters that were specific to HK. I haven't ran into such characters yet in my manga, but I keep wondering...

What are the differences between written HK Chinese vs Taiwan vs Mainland? Are there grammatical discrepancies? or is it just different vocabulary words being used like it's often the case between Taiwan and Mainland?

I guess it feels odd being able to understand the characters, yet knowing the sounds in my head are wrong since I don't know cantonese, haha.

Skritter team, will you add Cantonese pronunciation? ;) j/k

Cantonese is an entirely different language from Mandarin. They use traditional Chinese characters in HK, but colloquial Cantonese has a number of terms that in writing use characters created only for Cantonese.

As for mainland vs Taiwan, the differences are pretty small. Check this - http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/mandarin-differences.php - to get an idea.

Hey,

Indeed, when I used to live in HK I had the surprise to find out that the HK version were quite different than the TW's one. If you have no idea about the differences (that is : 不是 = 唔系 or 謝謝 = 唔該..etc) you will have some difficulties to understand. However, if you chinese level is good enough I think you can read without much problems.

Yes Skritter team, add canto please! :)

@Shinyspoons

This yellowbridge's page give a quite accurate point of view with the differences between TW and ML

Especially this part :

The difference in the pronunciation of most retroflex intials (zh, ch, sh) versus the non-retroflex equivalents (z, c, s) is less pronounced. This is especially obvious in the way the sh is pronunced, which is almost indistinguishable from s.

I have sometime problems with some people as I indeed pronunce 是 as a 四 or 吃 as a 此。 However, this is the daily life speaking, at school they teach you "standard" pronunciation (兒 is still never used : 快點, 男孩)

There are a lot of differences in the pronunciation of the characters between ML and TW. Just out of my mind, I can recall these characters and their ML and then TW pronunciations 期 qī, qí 微 wēi, wéi 击 jī, jí 堤 dī, tí 癌 ái, yán 括 kuō, guā 朴 pǔ (also pò), pú 寂 jì, jí 質 zhì, zhí 携xié, xí 崖 yá, yái. Give me more time to look up the dictionaries; I think I can list over 50 characters. If we consider the words, and not counting those with neutral tones and r endings, I think I can list over 300 words with different pronunciations.

Mainland is also quite varied. Whenever I go from Beijing to Shanghai I notice the er-hua and more neutral tones at the end of words (e.g. 朋友) on Hainan Island they use 小妹 instead of 小姐 amongst many, many other changes. The nice thing about the mainland is that there is at least a (rough) standard nationally.

@2shanghai

Shanghainese people has a very close pronunciation from the Taipei's one

@PTS : Do not mix different "pronunciation" and different "tone". As I said earlier, you will only heard "是“ as a "四" in the daily life stuff, officially 是 sounds the same as it should be on the ML. Also, people whose parents are born in China tends to speak a little bit more like ML.

In the other hands, that's treue that some 漢字 has different tone, but I don't know if it's "official" or not

@Tortue
I’ve compiled a short list of some characters that have different tones at http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=agVza3JpdHIWCxINVm9jYWJMaXN0SW5mbxisrpkKDA . I’m still working on it and it’s far from complete. The pinyins are official, you can take a look. I’ve not published it, so I don’t know if you can access it.

@Tortue
Ah, you live in TW. Sorry, I didn’t notice that in my previous post. The differences between ML and TW that I mentioned are official. You can check the TW pronunciations from http://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw . That is how they are taught at school and differs from saying "是" as a "四", which is a result of not learning the standard.
Actually, the differences are in tones, vowels (崖yá, yái) and initial consonants (堤 dī, tí). For the words, examples are (主角zhǔjué，zhǔjiǎo), (垃圾 lājī, lèsè), etc…