That was a while back, on an older account of mine, and, in fairness I guess, that specifically didn't get me banned or comment mod deleted, it just caused a significant reaction from a bunch of angry commenters telling me that either that was impossible or I am wrong in some way that makes me an obvious either idiot or bad faith liar of some kind.

It also may have been on hexbear, not ml, I do get them confused, and yeah, this was ... I think around or over a year ago now?

But uh yeah, I think what was pissing them off was my later assertion that uh, no, Cantonese and Mandarin are so distinct, in so many ways, mutually unintelligible to such a large degree, that... its really more like you have the whole family of Romance languages, and though they share common vocabulary roots and grammatical / syntactical roots... they are different languages more than they are different dialects of the same language, the difference is way more extreme than say, East Coast US English and South African English.

I guess I'd be curious if you agree or disagree with that, as a Cantonese speaker yourself.

Like uh, I myself don't speak any Mandarin or Cantonese, but a cursory look into this shows fairly extreme differences in vocabulary, and like, Mandarin apparently has 4 tones, whereas Cantonese has 6 tones?

And my Cantonese friend was... the one who told me that just no, Cantonese and Mandarin are different languages, we cannot understand each other.

The fuller scenario was this:

Me and Cantonese friend go to largest asian market in US West Coast city.

She encounters another Chinese woman, a vendor, and ... she is trying to formulate a question I have about some food, originally in English, she tries to render this in Cantonese, realizes the vendor speaks Mandarin and far less English than my Cantonese friend.

We futz around with translators on our phones for a while, untill my Cantonese friend randomly finds a Vietnamese woman passing by, who speaks Vietnamese, Cantonese and a bit of English... and we discover that the Mandarin vendor also speaks Vietnamese reasonably well.

So now, we are going me (english) -> my friend (decent english and cantonese) -> Vietnamese passerby (vietnamese, cantonese, tiny bit of english) -> vendor (in vietnamese)... and then back again.

We were all laughing a lot at how silly this all was, but it did end up working, and all of that silliness was because my Cantonese friend could hardly understand any Mandarin... and of course because of myself asking some apparently too linguistically complex question about dumplings and noodles or something, and my Cantonese friend really wanting be able to answer my question, lol.