Being a Bilingual

When I was young, I moved to Shenzhen which is a city near Hong Kong with my parents. Most people there speak Cantonese instead of mandarin. Therefore I got a chance to learn a second new language. However as Cantonese seems a dialect of Chinese, I am not sure about if my experience of speaking two different languages can be counted as bilingual.
When you are trying to adapt to a new environment, the most useful and effective tool is the native language, in my experience, it is Cantonese. Young age is an advantage in learning languages. I can speak Cantonese as fluent as most native Cantonese only after a few weeks of study, which helps me make lots of Cantonese friends and adapt into the life there. In general, native residence always shows prejudice and even discrimination on immigrants, the ability of speaking the native language would help bring kindness from those native residences to you. Furthermore, the understanding of the language leads to a faster comprehensive of the culture there. Nowadays, I can still both mandarin and Cantonese to communicate with people, it helps me a lot. Similarly, if you can speak both English and Spanish, it obviously helps.
Learning new language is always with difficulties. When you start to learn a new language, as the limitation of age and something else, you can hardly speak really native as native speakers did. Also, while the way of learning a new language, you might gradually lose your native accent of your previous language. However, it is not a big problem.
Being a bilingual is a good phenomenon of communications among cultures. I hope I can speak more languages in the future.