Pronunciation
Someone who only speaks Mandarin will not be able to understand the Cantonese language and vice versa, which has different dialects. While they are both tonal languages, Mandarin has only four tones per sound, while Cantonese has at least six up to nine.
Japanese speakers find it difficult to pronounce foreign words as it has 100 “sounds” and the entire repertoire of a Japanese speaker’s tongue is covered within the English language. Moreover, the language is flat so you won’t find struggling with different intonations as you might with Mandarin or Cantonese.
Native speakers around the world
Mandarin has spread across all parts of China and the Cantonese language is spoken largely in Hong Kong, in Macau, and the Guangdong province, including the industrial city of Guangzhou.
More than 90% of the Japanese speakers are Japanese people living in Japan. Curiously, the Japanese do not have official status in Japan, but it is obviously the only national language in Japan.
Opportunities
Fluency in Japanese allows people to improve communication and a higher understanding of Japan as a nation and as a culture that also prepares you for a better future and, more opportunities for work would be available.
Cantonese is a fine dialect, more useful in LA, so there’s that safeguard if you can speak Mandarin. Cantonese is always a cultural language, and, Mandarin is more important.
Grammar
The grammar is almost identical between Mandarin and Cantonese, however, Mandarin changes the sentence structure based on the subject of the sentence. Cantonese, follows a more logical pattern where more idiomatic expressions are used which requires an advanced level of linguistic expertise.
With three writing scripts, Japanese grammar is not actually that complicated. the reason Japanese grammar is often said to be hard is simply that it is so different from English. Plurals don’t exist and you don’t have to spend time learning them.
