system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How similar (or dissimilar) are Cantonese and Mandarin?

I get that they are totally separate languages but how interrelated are they? Is it like Spanish and Portuguese where there are many similarities? Or is it more like Spanish and Italian where they aren't similar but have a base in a common language (Latin)?
gpt
The speaker of one cannot understand the speaker of another language. There are differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar (This often leads to problems when *writing Cantonese*, as written Chinese is based on Mandarin. and Standard Mandarin often don't recognize some of the grammatical forms and characters native to Cantonese). Both languages are part of the Sinitic Language family, Mandarin is part of the Northern subbranch and Cantonese is part of the Yue subbranch, so yes, it's kind of like the difference between Italian and French. Both langauges are descended from Old Chinese.