Scandinavians vs Mandarin and Cantonese

actualy, many chinese people claim that mandarin chinese and cantonese are both chinese language.
they say that cantonese is just a regional dialect of chinese language
but i don't think so =(

Cantonese inherits and a mass of Ancient Chinese language, and it passes on the cultural lamp to the modern times.

Mandarin is actually a National common language of China, although it also derives from Ancient Chinese language, it has already been updated to large extent to meet the demand of modern language, and I feel that Mandarin's pronunciation would be easier than Cantonese's for Western foreigners to learn well. And the complexities of Ancient Chinese have been mostly replaced by the simpleness of Mandarin, in both written form and spoken form. The more important advantage is that if you're able to speak and read Mandarin Chinese, you'll have more chances to talk with much more Chinese people, even a lot of Cantonese people can speak Mandarin (not very fluently). But if you can only speak Cantonese, you can talk with nobody BUT the people of Hongkong, Macau, and Guangdong Province. Finally I don't believe so much that every foreigner can speak Cantonese very classically and purely in a short time.