What is Chinese?
Chinese is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world – more than a million people live in China and nearly all of them speak Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is the official language of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) as well as one of the official languages in Singapore. Government officials in China first started using Mandarin as a way for officials from different regions to communicate. Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect.
Mandarin is known as putonghua in Mainland China, guoyu in Taiwan and huayu in Singapore. Chinese dialects are classified into several groups: Northern dialects, Wu dialects, Xiang dialects, Gan dialects, Jin dialects, Kejia (Hakka) dialects, Yue dialects (Cantonese and others) and Min dialects (various). Some of these dialects are intelligible among Chinese speakers while others are not. Historically, Cantonese has been widely spoken in Chinese communities around the world.
Chinese can be an easy and difficult language at the same time. It is easy because it does not have irregular verbs or noun plurals. The language lacks the grammar of European languages or of Japanese and Korean. The word order of sentences in Chinese is similar to English: subject-verb-object. However, the tones and the written language can pose some challenges for learners.
The tones in spoken Chinese are pitches that distinguish different words from each other. There are four tones in Mandarin along with a neutral tone. The pitch of the first tone is high level, the second tone is high rising, the third tone is falling and rising and the fourth tone is falling. For example, mā is mother, má is numb, mǎ is horse and mà is to scold.
Written Chinese consists of characters that represent words and ideas. In general, words can have different meanings depending on context and how the characters are grouped together. The Chinese characters used today likely stemmed from inscriptions on oracle bones from ancient times. The writing system can be difficult because a learner must memorize thousands of characters just to read a newspaper.
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California considers Chinese to be a group four language, which means that it is in the category of languages that is most difficult to learn based on the number of hours of classroom instruction.
Technological advances have made spoken and written Chinese easier to learn. There are numerous electronic tools and resources on the Internet to aid Chinese learners. Dictionaries, vocabulary lists, pronunciation guides and other information can be quickly accessed on the Internet. Electronic dictionaries, podcasts and software can be purchased as well.
