Quote Originally Posted by bagandscalpel
This's piqued my curiosity, but how so? As far as Chinese goes, the written language is all the same; shouldn't the spoken dialects simply be different pronunciations for each character?
The written language is largely the same, but there are differences enough to confuse people who don't understand the different dialets. Just in Singapore alone, there are already 4 different types of dialets, which are generally used by the elders and senior citizens. The younger generation mostly only understand Mandarin, and perhaps 1 more dialet used within family members, such as Teo Chew, Hokkien, or Cantonese.

As for Mizuchi, the text books I'm using now are completely void of English, and I haven't seen the Japanese for Dummies book. I'm sure it's a good starting point to understand the basics as well as the character sets.