Icky

Hong Kong is not only way different than Beijing, but it is way different that Canton, just up the Pearl River.

You would be surprised at how easy it was to spot mainlanders on the streets of Hong Kong. Their looks, walks, and talks, gave them away immediately.

(I was a 16-year resident of HK)

rfwu

not to mention the Beijing accent of "eeerrrr" in their words!

rfwu

oops, that only applies to people from Beijing!

Acinom

Imagine if the Roman Empire never disintegrated, and that's China in Asia. Regionalism is very prominent, and the dialects are so different in some cases that they sound as different as French is from Spanish and Italian. Cantonese is a strong example of that. I speak Mandarin and can't understand people from Hong Kong at all. I can understand Shanghainese, but can hardly speak it. China is very multicultural, but you'll only see that if you go to many different cities or venture into the countryside where there are more minority groups.

Loren Pechtel

No. It's just dialects, but the differences are extreme. It's all one language--they communicate fine by writing even when they can't understand a word the other one is saying.
It's strange seeing Chinese movies subtitled in Chinese. Useful, though--my wife has taught herself a fair amount of Cantonese this way.

Loren Pechtel

I'll have to disagree.

Death valley is hotter than any part of China. It's also lower--something you didn't list.

I do agree it's got bigger mountians. I don't know about deserts one way or another. It does win in the rainforest department--southern China is way south of southern America.

Colder I will disagree with. You are forgetting Alaska.

Secular Pinoy

British English and American English are dialects. The various Scandinavian Languages may be considered as dialects. But Cantonese and Mandarin? Except for the writing system, they are miles apart. It is unfair, IMO, to call such vastly different languages as Cantonese and Mandarin as merely dialects. I think they've earned the right to be called separate Languages. Much of Europe uses one of two writing system (the western Alphabet and the eastern Cyrillic) as well, yet even closely related tongues, such as Portuguese and Spanish, are given the title of language.

rfwu

C'ept Alaska is only used for fishing and oil!

And nobody lives in Death valley! But then again, nobody lives in the Goby desert either!

fried beef sandwich

Oh yeah, that took me a long time to get used to - I was taught the Taiwanese version of Mandarin as a kid. "Ni2 Yarr4 Shemarr?" "Wo3 chu4 warrr3 le" ... still sounds weird to me.

And if i'm not mistaken, the Cantonese spoken these days sounds WAAAAY different than the Cantonese that is spoken at my home. For some reason, it sounds like ... I dunno, Mandarin speaking people trying to speak Cantonese - I was taught that there were 9 tones/inflections in Cantonese, maybe the language is evolving to a point where there aren't as many now?

Sarpedon

You can think of china as being a collection of distinct, though similar nations that are periodically united under a strong central regime. During most of history, china has been disunited, though the idea of unity has always been there. There are several regions of china that are culturally distinct, and whenever the central government breaks up, they more or less go back to being independent entities. Szechuan, for example was once (more than once actually) an independant kingdom called Shu. Most chinese refer to themselves as "Han" though at one time there was a relatively small country in north central china called "Han". that is where the rulers of the han dynasty came from, and because chinese consider that to be their golden age, they refer to themselves as "Han". Southern China is called "Wu", and the people there were considered to have different talents than people from the northern parts, called Jin, Wei, Yan, Han, Qin, and so forth. Most of these regional appellations are no longer used, but I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese still identify themselves with them. Manchurians aren't chinese at all, belonging to the turkic ethnic group, I believe. In ancient times Manchuria was called Liao. The reason that Manchuria is considered a part of china is because the Manchus conquered china, and set up the Ch'ing dynasty, which was china's last imperial dynasty. (insidently, they broke from the tradition of naming the dynasty after a geographic region, probably because their region wasn't considered part of china. Ch'ing is some kind of superlative adjective I think). The long tail of hair, called a "queue" is a manchurian hairstyle that was forced on the chinese during that time. Traditionally, chinese didn't cut their hair at all, wearing it in elaborate headresses.

I'm rambling. I hope that this is both informative and true. Those of you who are actually from china, please feel free to correct me on any point.