To speak with Chinese people in the United States, should I learn Mandarin or Cantonese?

Ask them which language they speak!

It seems that many Chinese-Americans who came long ago came from Southern China and speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin.

New migrants will likely speak Mandarin.

To the person below me. Mandarin a LOCAL language in China? It's the official language of China and spoken by 70% of the population, and compulsory at school

Most Chinese-Americans (as well as Chinese-Canadians) speak Cantonese. That's mainly because up until recently, most immigrants came from the southern parts of China - Hong Kong. If you visit your local Chinatown, you'll find that most people speak Cantonese.

Mandarin is easier for a non-Chinese to learn because of pinyin and softer-flowing sounds. Cantonese is in a way like German, a lot of blunt awkward-ending sounds which can be difficult for non-Chinese tongue to master.

Mandarin is obviously greater easy to assessment than Cantonese, given which you have the pinyin gadget in mandarin and in basic terms 4 an awful lot, yet Cantonese has 9 an awful lot or so plus the writing gadget is greater stable provided that they use classic characters. I easily have somewhat some friends from Hong Kong who're now gaining understanding of Mandarin, and that i ought to declare that they study it speedier than i did (French is my first language), i could suggestion you to assessment Mandarin first however, then Cantonese. i individually think of that in case you study one language you're able to spend much less time gaining understanding of yet another language from an identical relatives, by using fact the two have some similarities. stable success!

Most Chinese people in the United States can speak English,but you'd better learn some Mandarin.

of course Mandarin. In the world there are only around 0.1 billion Cantonese speakers while there are 1.3 billion Mandarin speakers only in China. Most of the Cantonese speakers could understand Mandarin because Chinese government has managed to popularized Mandarin in the nation wide. So, if you speak Cantonese, lots of Chinese people will not understand you as Mandarin speakers can hardly understand Cantonese unless they learn this dialect. Plus, most of the China relevant books are published in Chinese (simplified/traditional) including Pure Land Buddhism. As far as I know, there are no books that have been published in Cantonese writing.
If you don't believe what I told above, you may go to http://www.hellochina.com/user to inquire more. It's a website frequented by Chinese college students and internationals.

Generally, Mandarin is spoken by northern chinese people. Cantonese is spoken in southern china such as Hong Kong and Guang Zhou and even in Vietnam.

Mandarin is more widely spoken in America, China, and just worldwide.

Mandarin and Cantonese can both be learned easily if you learn one or the other since they are somewhat like cousin languages.

Starting out though, Mandarin would be a better choice.

To learn Mandarin, this site can help with vocab and pronunciation:
http://pinyin.org

click on "dictionary" and there you can search for characters and pinyin. there, you can also hear the correct pronunciation

mandarin is more widely used as well as easier to learn. here's a link with some information on the 2.

http://khuang.com/chinese/dif.htm

Cantonese

Cantonese is most commonly used in the U.S. as Mandarin is just a little bit of a local language in China and not many people bring it here in the U.S.