what's the best dialect to learn after mandarin?

[Smoothie]

or what's the most spoken one after mandarin? b/c i'm looking at learning another dialect and don't want to learn one that people don't use a lot. is it cantonese or taiwanese?

[Quest]

cantonese.

unless u plan to stay and live in taiwan.

[林彪]

It's Cantonese, by far. The majority of Chinese Americans speak Cantonese.

[Smoothie]

oh really? i just thought that since taiwan is big, a lot of people would speak taiwanese. do they speak taiwanese in the mainland?

[geraldc]

I think Cantonese would be far more useful. You're more likely to hear Cantonese on your travels around the world than any other dialect. Plus with overseas Cantonese speakers they're far more likely not to speak mandarin/putonghua, so at least it will come in useful. I think most people who speak any of the Taiwanese popular dialects will also speak mandarin/putonghua, so it would be a little redundant learning it, especially when you already have a dialect you can communicate in. Also courses and text books for Cantonese do seem quite plentiful.

[wix]

I will be a contrarian here. I suggest learning the dialect which will be of most use to you in the circumstances you are in. If you live in Shanghai learn Shanghainese. If you live in Taiwan learn Taiwanese. If you are hanging out with the Hakka learn Hakka. I know most people will say you should learn Cantonese and it is probably a great idea if you live in HK or Guangdong or are going to have a lot of contact with Cantonese speaking people elsewhere, but it really is not so useful if you live in Taiwan or Shanghai, etc.

[wix]

do they speak taiwanese in the mainland?

Yes, but they don't call it Taiwanese. It is called Minnanhua and is spoken in the southern part of Fujian Province. Indeed there are probably more people speaking "Taiwanese" in China than there are in TAiwan.

[pazu]

Yes I agree with Wix. If you go to Chaozhou then learn Chaozhouhua (Teochew). According to the CIA World Facts Wu Chinese (represented by Shanghainese) has more speakers than Cantonese, but it's fair to say you will indeed have more chance to speak Cantonese Chinese than Wu Chinese.

[ala]

Wu Chinese is the second largest Chinese dialect after Mandarin. The only problem is that Wu is really diverse. For example, there's over half a dozen sets of I/you/he/this/that among the Wu dialects. Northern Wu (Suzhou, Shanghai, Ningbo) sound pretty much the same though. I've never personally met anyone who learned Shanghainese or other Wu dialects. It's pretty hard to learn since there's almost no resource material. But I'm sure it can be done though. A dialect like Shanghainese needs to have audio, tone marks won't cut it since they are thrown out the window in speech. There are classes now in Shanghai, but they seem focused more on word trivia than actual functionality and fluency.

Yeah, if you want to learn a dialect, learn whatever dialect in the region you are going to be in. Otherwise it's a waste of your time.

[Quest]

The only problem is that Wu is really diverse

Same thing is true for Yue dialects. 1 hour's drive from Guangzhou, you will hear a different version of Cantonese, and 2 hours away it's virtually unintelligible, but then farther away in HongKong and Macau, you can find the same version again. The dialect you hear most often in the u.s. is Taishanhua, often grouped into Cantonese, but I can hardly understand a word in Taishanhua.

Once I went to this nursing home(apartment style) to visit my grandmother, for some reason when I pressed my grandmother's doorbell, her neighbor's bell sounded too. Then these two Taishan nannies came over knocking on our door, and yelled at me in Taishanhua like I killed their son or something. I had no idea what they were yelling about, until they showed me the pressing a button pose.

[Ian_Lee]

Actually Dongguan, the county sandwiched between Guangzhou and Hong Kong, has a dialect which is totally unintelligible to me.

For the overseas Chinese community, I only found the inland cities of Malaya Peninsula like Ipoh and Taiping spoke pure Cantonese.

But it seems that they now speak a mix of dialects.

[ala]

Same thing is true for Yue dialects. 1 hour's drive from Guangzhou, you will hear a different version of Cantonese, and 2 hours away it's virtually unintelligible

Oh really? From a non-Cantonese speaker's perspective, it seems Cantonese is really unified; at least it seems there is a clear standard, and everyone accepts it. So curious question, what does 广东话 refer to? All the dialects within 广东省, or a specific dialect in/from 广东省? I've been getting the impression that everyone who speaks a variant of 广东话 seems to say they speak 广东话, leading me to think it's completely comprehensible amongst Cantonese speakers and that the variations are like rural/urban. And I also thought that even if some of the dialects of 广东话 are incomprehensible, there is still a standard in 广东话 based I presume in 广州 or 香港 that everyone agrees to as the almighty 粤语 standard that people sing to. So I'm guessing that the latter must be true since you said Cantonese dialects are diverse too, but if that's the case, wouldn't the younger generations "bridge the gap" and become all standard 广东话 speakers if such a standard exists? So is there a standard at all in Cantonese? It seems like there is....

As a Wu speaker, I always feel like I'm telling a hyperbole when I say Wu is the second largest Chinese dialect after Mandarin. Because it's not only very different in different regions, there's also no agreeable standard. A 苏州人 will never succumb this statement: "Shanghai is by far the more influential city today, therefore 苏州 (50km away) should start speaking the Shanghainese variant of 吴语." This is even considering that 新派苏州话 and 新派上海话 are completely understandable to each other (besides Shanghai's 侬 noN being switched with Suzhou's 你 ney). For that petty difference, 苏州人 will call their dialect 苏州话. 宁波话 in Zhejiang province gets to be even more unwilling to accept neither Shanghai's nor Suzhou's cultural dominance. There's also 松江话(20km from Shanghai)、无锡话(80km from Shanghai)、崇明话 (10 km from Shanghai), even 浦东话、江湾话 which are in the city of Shanghai, etc. Each city in the 江南 area has a fill in the blank话, even though they might sound exactly the same albeit some word frequency differences. I blame it on the general arrogance of 江南人 and their individualist (or interpreted as xenophobic) streak. Many times Northern Wu dialects just sound different in the quality, as in how hard the syllables are, how fast it is... etc. The term 吴语 is only used by linguists. And most Wu speakers aren't even aware that Southern Wu dialects are part of the same family of dialects, since "they sound so different." This situation also explains why music with Shanghainese lyrics are limited to Shanghai only (and therefore you don't see music with Shanghainese lyrics anyway). This doesn't seem to be the case for Cantonese music though..... Maybe the Wu dialects can learn something from that..? Or is all the unity in Cantonese because of Hong Kong and that without Hong Kong, Cantonese would be in the same boat as Wu?

[Quest]

ala, it's the same thing everywhere. A 台山人 would tell you he's speaking 台山话，a 顺德人 would tell you he's speaking 顺德话，新会人 speak 新会话。The so called standard Cantonese is 广府/广州话, and it is pretty much a self-given standard (there's been no effort to "enforce" the "standard" locally). According to you, I guess 广州（省城）does/did have more influence over its pronvince than 上海。I have friends from 福建, and they told me the same thing is true in 福建, a few miles from 福州, it's a different 闽 subdialect.

[Guest eventide]

学好普通话，走遍全天下

[skylee]

雖然沒錯, 但聽起來有點太自大了, 而且人家問的是除普通話以外該學甚麼方言.

[Guest eventide]

呵呵开玩笑呢，别当真

[TSkillet]

The dialect you hear most often in the u.s. is Taishanhua

Uh, no. It's standard Cantonese - or failing that Taiwanese accent Mandarin.

[ever00t]

or what's the most spoken one after mandarin?

First of all,learn Accurate Chinese Mandarin is the most recommended.

Secondly Cantonese/Taiwanese is toatally different story from Chinese mandarin,let's assume that you have learned say 5,000 Chinese words in Mandarin and you are going to learn Cantonese/Taiwanese ? That you have to restart it all over again from the beginning.Although the grammar between them are almost same,but you have to learn such things like -> different handwriting of them,different tones ,stuff like that.

Try pay 95% of your attentions to Chinese Mandarin,the rest of it is only the interest cause,this's reasonable.

Chinese gov. has started to promote Mandarin in Hongkong and in Taiwan right after China retakes Taiwan island.

Really my friend why bother learn the official language in China but just go for some 'dialects' study ?I'm sure by speaking/write fluent Chinese Mandarin is very appreciated rather than speaking some Chinese dialects,the key is you are non-chinese speaker so you've got to spend many times to try to learn Mandarin,you are not sure if you are capable of doing it great not mention you do think you have time to tease with Chinese dialect study ?

[Ian_Lee]

Chinese gov. has started to promote Mandarin in Hongkong and in Taiwan right after China retakes Taiwan island.

This statement is very politically arrogant.

First of all, Beijing has no say in the education issue under 1C2S since it is strictly HK's internal affairs. Second, though Mandarin is promoted in HK (not on the initiative of Beijing), Canontese is still the lingua franca and Cantonese as well as English still remain as the medium of instruction.

And of course the traditional script is the official script in Hong Kong. The 2,000+ Mainland-based companies, Bank of China, Chinese Foreign Ministry,.......etc all use traditional script in their public announcement/correspondence in HK.

Regarding Taiwan, before China retakes it, everybody there has already learnt to speak Mandarin.

Maybe they can help you "perfect" your Mandarin.

[skylee]

I agree with Ian. Arrogant it is.