The Chinese dialects/languages are closer than you’d think. Many sayings and phrases and concepts are the same, or at least extremely close.

To give you an example, I am a native Mandarin speaker and I’ve learned Cantonese. Unlike when I was learning English, learning Cantonese as a Mandarin speaker was more or less learning a slightly altered pronunciation system and plug that into the vocabulary and grammar I already know.

What I’m asking myself is: how exactly did they compare the stories? Doesn’t a lot of the story get lost in translation? And is the research mainly focussed on linguistic differences, or rather cultural and gender ones? E.g. how about the difference between the story of a English speaking South-African man and, say, that of an American sixteen year old girl living in Suburbia?