[thaumasiotes]

> they're vastly different languages, like how German and Italian aren't dialects of European

They're different, but not that different. If we believe Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese ):

> [Varieties of Min] form the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese.

So the divergence between Mandarin and Cantonese [neither belonging to the Min branch] could be dated back maybe 1500 years. The divergence between German and Italian is much, much older than that.

English and Swedish would make a more apt comparison than German and Italian.

[AlchemistCamp]

This might be true if the speakers were equally distant from each other and had an equal amount of contact with each other.

I've spoken Mandarin for over 20 years, studied French and Spanish for a few years each and also learned a bit of Cantonese and a bit of Taiwanese. In my subjective experience, French and Spanish are by far the closest of any two of those languages. Cantonese and Taiwanese would be the next closest and Mandarin is considerably further from either than they are from each other.

[thaumasiotes]

> In my subjective experience, French and Spanish are by far the closest of any two of those languages.

This is precisely what you would expect from the divergence times.

> Cantonese and Taiwanese would be the next closest and Mandarin is considerably further from either than they are from each other.

This isn't; Taiwanese is the outgroup to the more closely related pair of Mandarin/Cantonese.

It's always possible that learning "a bit of Cantonese and a bit of Taiwanese" doesn't give you a good grasp of what's going on in Cantonese and Taiwanese.