Is this mandarin? Or Cantonese?

[Gestalt]

I picked up a free Chinese magazine while in our local China town today, with the intention of

skimming a few articles just to see how much Mandarin vocab I could recognize. I'm still a beginner in Mandarin.

Problem is (and this is embarrassing..) I realise I can't even tell if the magazine is using Mandarin (traditional charatcers) or Cantonese! A link to an article on the magazine's online site is here

I recognise a lot of traditional chinese characters thanks to knowing Japanese, but are there any tips anyone can give me about how to tell the difference, at a glance, between Mandarin-written-in-traditional-characters, and Cantonese? Or do the two in fact look the same?

[Ncao]

It's standard Chinese (Mandarin). You would know when something is written in Cantonese when you see characters like 唔 and 冇. Most Chinese publications are in standard Chinese with the exception of some HK tabloids.

[skylee]

Perhaps there is some misunderstanding ... On the whole people write in standard mandarin, regardless of whether they use simplified or traditional characters (e.g. Mainland/Singapore vs Taiwan/HK/Macau), what dialect they speak and where they come from. The writing style and vocabulary may be a bit different but the grammar should be the same.

I think only a few HK magazines/newspapers are written in Cantonese, using Cantonese grammar and Cantonese-specific characters (many of them with a mouth 口 radical on the left). Examples are 喺, 嗰, 啲, etc.

[amego]

Yea, also take note that only Hong Kong and Taiwan (in my knowledge) still use traditional characters. I've seen written colloquial Cantonese in some Hong Kong movies' subtitles.

Here is a an extract from here:

Cantonese is mainly an oral language. People in Hong Kong use standard Chinese (putonghua) when they read and write. They speak Cantonese in their daily interactions with people. As a colloquial language, Cantonese is full of slang and non-standard usage. The language of youth is rapidly evolving, and new slang and trendy expressions are constantly emerging.

Heres a good list of colloquial Cantonese characters.

[HashiriKata]

I looked at the page from link Gestalt gave and curiously, it has a button to click for the "中文" version, as if the page itself is not Chinese

[amego]

LOL...anyway the "English" button seems to be useless.

[liuzhou]

anyway the "English" button seems to be useless.

That's normal.

[amego]

That's normal.

I see i see.

[opper567]

Does classical chinese look like cantonese vernacular? I think I've seen many of those cantonese characters before.

[Quest]

Does classical chinese look like cantonese vernacular?

No, classical chinese was spoken (if ever) so long ago that I think even before cantonese and mandarin ancestral dialects diverged, their parent dialect was already very different from classical chinese. Both Cantonese and Mandarin retain different sets of old words.

[Gestalt]

it has a button to click for the "中文" version,

I wish I had a "Chinese" button..

[LiYuanXi]

I wish I had a "Chinese" button..

Hahaha.. I think everyone wish they had a button like that too!