Mandarin vs. Cantonese and Simplified vs. Traditional?

it's quite diff languages. like european, they had slightly diff languages between countries...... China is a hugh country w/ many provinces....... each province speak diff language. even mandarin wil hv slightly diff........cantonese is usually use among HKnese & chinese who's lives in Canton province.

Mandarin vs Cantonese is comparable to Italian and Spanish, both are different languages and one basically cannot understand the other if one has never learned the other dialect or language, but because both originate from the same root, there are a lot of similarities so that learning the new language or dialect is much more easier than learning an entirely different one. Because Mandarin and Cantonese are both Chinese, they share the same sentence syntax and grammar, and some words are pronounced exactly the same, it's quite easy to pick up the other within a short time.

Simplified characters refer to about maybe a third of the traditional characters that have been modified to be written in a simpler format. If one learns traditional, it's easier to read the simplified than the other way round.