Cantonese

"Cantonese"

I am not a native speaker of any spoken Chinese dialect but wish to understand public media and have an ability to speak comparable to my English fluency. I have chosen Cantonese over Mandarin for this purpose for two reasons. First I understand Cantonese to be closer to the spoken language of the classics and secondly that it is the lingua franca of the overseas Chinese.

From the start, however my language goals call for a unification of the convergent languages in [sprachraum|Wen Ren] and the level of the human language facility. In particular while we accept as a start the Hanzi and sound system of modern standard Chinese, we are more concerned with abstracting their technical properties in formation of the interlingua, whose spoken variant is what we really mean when we say "Cantonese".

http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org