[DonaldFisk]

Cantonese is unusual. It's seldom written down. Standard Chinese (i.e. the written form of Mandarin) is used instead. So there are two comparisons.

Spoken Cantonese + Yale vs. spoken Japanese + Romaji.

Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers (correction: honorifics), so it would be easier to learn to speak.

Spoken Cantonese + Written Chinese vs. spoken Japanese + Kanji + Kana.

Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji. There's no such hard limit on the number of Hanzi you need. (But there's the complication of On-yomi and kun-yomi pronunciations of the same kanji.)

The other issue is the quality and quantity of learning material. Japanese wins by a country mile.

[fiblye]

>Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji.

Students are taught around 2136 kanji in school, and there are a couple hundred more that aren't taught in school yet pretty much every adult knows and uses regularly. e.g., 嘘, the character for "a lie".

The fact kanji average over 2 readings each vs Chinese's average 1 reading each also makes Japanese quite difficult. When factoring in usage in names and extremely common kanji like 生, you can have well over a dozen possible readings which you can only learn through long exposure and living in the country. There are so many times where I think, "Oh, I've never seen that word but I can guess the pronunciation since I know the kanji", only to be shut down and told it's some weird exception.

[martalist]

> Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers, so it would be easier to learn to speak.

Registers being different levels of formality (informal, formal, slang, etc)? If so, Cantonese has that in spades.

Your answer also ignores the tonal nature of Cantonese/Mandarin. Most guides can't event agree to how many tones there are. I get by with 7, but it can range from 6 to 10 depending on who you speak to (in contrast to 4 in Mandarin).

[DonaldFisk]

What I meant by registers was different relationships/pronouns/verb endings to indicate different levels of politeness. I should have written honorifics. Japanese and Korean have these. Chinese languages don't.

I thought of mentioning tones, but they're not as much of a problem for learners as they're made out to be. Cantonese has seven tones. However, there are no word pairs where the only difference is that one has a high level tone where the other has a high falling tone.

[megaman22]

As an English speaker, the entire concept of tones is more than a little daunting.

On a lesser scale, the hardest thing about learning German, as, again, an English speaker, but one who had poor grammar instruction and no grounding in Latin, the idea of cases for verbs and pronouns was... weird.

[khedoros1]

Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word (though it's maddeningly easy to think of it as separate, with your English-brain saying that they can be safely ignored).

I've had a bunch of German, and just passing contact with Latin, but a lot of German grammar started making a lot more sense when I started thinking of those languages as similar in a sense, because of declension.

[martalist]

> Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word

True that. Also, it's just a different use of tone - English uses tone to differentiate questions from statements, and to otherwise add meaning to words/sentences. There are other mechanisms for that in Chinese dialects.

[ascorbic]

The best explanation I've heard of tones is the different pronunciations of "really" in "Really?" "Really!" "Really hungry" "Really good" etc

[pmontra]

Yes about the intonation of the word. The difference is that that "really" would mean "mom", "stupid", "really", "nothing" according to the tone. Some embarrassing mistakes.

[bklaasen]

Well, the previous poster's examples of "really" could be defined like this, based on interpretation of their intonation:

"Really?": Convince me; "Really!": I'm indignant on your behalf; "Really hungry": exceptionally [hungry]; "Really good": average.