[princeb]

the writing of cantonese is a complicated affair.

the only analogy i can cook up is that - imagine if formally, everyone wrote English in German, but when you speak you speak English, and when you read English you'd see German words and sentence structures but you will preprocess it into English before understanding it. and with different levels of formality, would You with underschiedenly Germandegrees speak English. but in no case would you speak German.