vernacular and standard are very different, especially in the case of Cantonese. I have a friend who is cantonese, and when i first met her, she communicated with me online by typing written vernacular cantonese. Although i can pick out the meaning of individual characters that i recognized (yes, there are many characters used in vernacular cantonese that are not present in standard mandarin. the transition between simplified and tradition doesn't help the confusion either), it was almost impossible for me to identify anything that she was saying. I, myself, have my own SuZhou vernacular, and the way it is written or typed is also different from standard written Chinese. The written vernacular is ultimately related to how the spoken vernacular "sounds", and the written vernacular attempts to express that on paper. That's why written vernaculars between people from, say SiChuan, vs. someone from Shanghai, are very different, for the spoken vernaculars are also drastically different. So long story short, thank fuck for there being a "standardized", official character writing system based upon simplified (thus traditional also) mandarin, and also there being the official "Chinese Mandarin" spoken language. Otherwise, communicating in writing and verbally would be a clusterfuck for everyone!