Cantonese is mainly spoken in Guangdong (capital Guangzhou, or Canton ) and Guangxi provinces, Hong Kong, Macao, as well as in numerous places in South-East Asia such as Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and most of the overseas Chinese communities in Canada, Australia, Europe, North America and other parts of the world. Cantonese is the most extensively spoken Chinese dialect after Mandarin because of it's strong influence in China's history, economy, and culture and also that most of the people who went abroad came from this region. Another interesting fact is that people who can understand either Mandarin or Cantonese can communicate with each other by writing because both of them use the same written characters, with a few exceptions. Verbal communication is a different matter. The pronunciation of the two are totally different, so they cannot understand each other by speaking. The two are tonal languages (different tones have different meanings for the same sound) and they also have different vowels and consonants.

For beginners, Cantonese can be more difficult because there are 6 (although it could be up to 9) tones in Cantonese while only 4 in Mandarin. Also, more learning materials are available in Mandarin and these days you may see more Mandarin speaking people than Cantonese. If you have a choice, it is strongly recommended to learn Mandarin.

In the 1950s, the government of Mainland China "simplified" the written forms of many "traditional" characters in order to make learning to read and write the language easier. In our center, we will focus on the modern simplified characters instead of traditional ones.

For comparison, here is a list of examples. Traditional forms are on the left, followed by their simplified forms, pinyin pronunciation, and English equivalents.