Chinese languages

do you not find it funny that some posts ask to speak a certain dialect of mandarin be it wu dialect, taiwan or whatever..i mean, you don't say that you would like to learn to speak the scottish dialect, or irish dialect of english would you??

Hi Jenny!

Not all that strange. If they meant the Taiwanese version of Mandarin, i.e. basically Mandarin with a few differences in pronunciation ("s" for "sh" etc.) and a slightly different vocabulary, then, yeah, that would be a very specific request.

But Taiwanese = Hokkien, Wu (Shanghainese), Cantonese, Hakka etc. are not dialects of Mandarin but its sister languages, branching of from the same large Chinese family tree, just like the "dialects" of Latin (French, spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc.). So, there's nothing strange about it

Regards,
Aurelio

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I live in Shanghai. As i know, many Shanghailander(native wu dialect speaker) cannot speak Mandarin well(with accent ).Of course , they can understand it well. Actually , wu dialect is another language if you mean languages are classified by their pronunciation. So is Cantonese.