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How easy is Cantonese for Mandarin Chinese speakers?

Going from Mandarin Chinese to Cantonese (粵語) has a composite linguistic distance of 22% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

22% distance FSI Cat IV (Hardest) — ~2,200 hours
Lexical similarity
65%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
100%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
67%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
100%

Chinese → Chinese

Genealogical kinship
70%

Sino-Tibetan ↔ Sino-Tibetan

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Other easy languages for Mandarin Chinese speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Mandarin Chinese:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. No signup.