[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by godwine

Mandarin is not a Language, its a dialect. There is no writing system as mandarin. There are 2 major Chinese dialect: Cantonese and Mandarin, and 2 writing system: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

This is very misleading. Yes, some linguists argue that Mandarin and Cantonese are merely dialects of "Chinese," but you basically do away with all meaning of the word "dialect" if you treat them as mere dialects of Chinese. The are mutually unintelligible and don't even really share the same writing system (yeah, they use hanzi, but there are some Canto hanzi that don't exist in Mandarin, and they're all pronounced very differently and the sentence structures are often different).

The writing systems are different enough (no, written Mandarin is not the same as written Cantonese despite what you may read in some intro book on Chinese language), the vocab is extremely different in pronunciation, etc.

The only reason people ever consider calling Mandarin and Cantonese "dialects" is because they are both spoken in China. Mandarin and Cantonese are more different than Swedish and Danish and Norwegian (if you speak one of these three, you can understand the other two very easily).

Taiwan is a remote island from China, they speak Mandarin and uses the Traditional Chinese writing System

They also speak Taiwanese. My wife and her family speak both Mandarin (with a Taiwanese accent) and Taiwanese (Hokkien).

Pronunciation though, I personally think that its closer to Cantonese: For the number 9 (九）- Japanese is Ku (Kyu), Cantonese is "Gau", while Mandarin is jiu.

One example doesn't make your suggestion correct. And linguists would tell you "kyuu" is closer to "jiu" than "gau" anyway.

But there are also Kanji that is pronounced completely different from its Chinese counterpart: The family name 林 - Hayashi in Japanese, Cantonese is "Lum", while Mandarin is "Lin"

And 林 is also read "rin" in Japanese, so there goes your theory that Cantonese and Japanese are more similar than M and J.

So when we want to talk about similarities, it will really depend on what aspect of the language we are referring to. Sentence structure and the use of grammar, I think Korean will be the closest. Writing and pronunciation, probably Chinese is closer....

I think this is very correct!