'Dialect' is a relative term.

I've heard that the different dialects in Chinese are like the differences in cognate languages like German, Dutch and English.

To further complicate things, Chinese is a tonal language, meaning that the same word can have several pronunciantions.

Also although Japanese kanji are based on Chinese characters, they still use the Japanese pronounciation for words, so the characters for 'Gau' and 'Inu' may look similar in Chinese and Japanese script.