Cantonese & Mandarin are basic two different Chinese dialects. Is it about as different as English is to Spanish? Or how different the slang from different parts of the U.S. is like?
Finish the analogy:
Mandarin is to Cantonese as English is to [blank]
Mandarin is to Cantonese as English is to Scots?
Mandarin is to Cantonese as English is to Gaelic.
Mandarin is to Cantonese as English is to Swedish.
Mandarin is to Cantonese as English is to German.
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Native English readers read these languages without much of problems?
No, but that’s different. European languages are written phonetically, whereas Chinese languages are written in meanings.
I read Scots native often write in English and read aloud in Scots.
I don’t know how Scots and English are different, though.
I think it’s more like German to Dutch. I can read Dutch and maybe understand simple sentences when spoken slowly.
No. English, Swedish, and German are all related as Germanic languages. Gaelic is a separate group of languages.
I don’t think most non-Cantonese Mandarin speakers can read this:
點止封區，遲下封埋曱甴區議員個上後口添呀，等你成日得個嘈字，咩都叫唔好做，剩識叫政府賠錢。
(The above was ripped from a comment on a HK news website.)
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Even English vs. Dutch would be too far apart to make a good analogy.
Oh yeah~! I got one!
Mandarin is to Cantonese as English is to Old English.
Did I get it right?
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I think there’s already a thread about this, but let’s do it anyway. 
That’s more like what Cantonese speakers do with their own language. If they read “standard Chinese” but use Cantonese pronunciation, they change the pronunciation of basically everything but also replace words along the way e.g. pronouns. It would be like…
Imagine English and German written in pictographs, so 
means [3rd person singular masculine pronoun] [verb to have] [number 1] [dog].
In German it’s er hat ein Hund, and if German and English are supposed to use the same words with different pronunciations, in English it should be he has one hound, but in reality most native English speakers would say dog instead of hound, and depending on the context possibly a instead of one (even though hound and one are perfectly good English words, in the right contexts). So a Cantonese speaker will (usually) read 他有一隻狗 by replacing the 他 with 佢, even though 他 exists in (formal) Cantonese.
Dog is easily translated to German as Hund, but etymologically it’s completely different and has no cognate in German. 佢 theoretically exists in Mandarin but isn’t used.
Scots is definitely closer to English than Mandarin is to Cantonese.
Not really. The grammar has changed a lot.
Spanish to French.
Is that typical, or an extreme example?
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Cantonese to mandarin is like English to Spanish.
It’s not a dialect but a completely different spoken language. The only similarity is that they share the same written language.
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That’s kinda too far. English and Spanish are in different language families.
They’re only dialects by the Chinese of definition of dialect, not by the Western linguistic definition. Cantonese and Mandarin are different languages. They’re not mutually intelligible, especially in the spoken form.
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I don’t agree. As a native English speaker I can understand most of Scots if spoken clearly, but my wife as a native Mandarin speaker can’t understand much of any Cantonese.
