Comment by inkyoto
4 hours ago
Unlike Mandarin and other Chinese languages, Cantonese does not have tone sandhi and has changed tones instead.
Cantonese tones are also different from those of Mandarin, so no, it can't be adopted for Cantonese and it would require a complete rework.
> It is a surprisingly difficult language to learn.
I keep hearing this quite a bit, but I do not find Cantonese to be any more difficult than most languages[0]. Or at least we would need to define a metric based on which we could assess the difficulty. If it is the number of tones, their number (six – no, not nine) may look formidable at first, but they are, in fact, rather simple tones and broadly fall into three categories: flat, rising, and falling. As a random example, Cantonese does not even have a dipping tone.
In comparison, «fancy» tones of Vietnamese are significantly more challenging or even difficult – they can curl and unfurl (so to speak).
[0] That crown appears to belong to Archi, with honourable mentions going out to Inuit, Basque, Georgian, Navajo, Yimas and several other polysynthetic languages.
Cantonese is "hard" mainly for two reasons-
1. tones, and generally the gatekeeping of some Cantonese communities towards people who haven't gotten the tones completely right
2. the lack of learning materials relative to the number of speakers, the confusion between written Chinese and written Cantonese (and also the general lack of the latter)
As they say, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy"... I'll leave it at that.