| Learning Basic Mandarin Chinese 1: An Introduction |
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| Tuesday, 05 June 2007 | |||||
Page 1 of 3 The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語 or 中文) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as its native language, making it the most common natively-spoken language in the world. There is great internal variety within Chinese, and spoken Chinese languages such as Standard Mandarin (Putonghua), Shanghainese (Wu) and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible. Nevertheless, there is a single standardized form of Chinese known as Standard Mandarin, which is based on the dialect of Beijing, which in turn is just one dialect within Mandarin, a large and diverse group of Chinese dialects spoken in Northern and Southwestern China. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations. Standard Mandarin also corresponds to the modern standard written Chinese language used by people speaking all forms of Chinese from all corners of China, including Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, Min-nan, and so forth.Chinese grammar is in many ways simpler than European languages (for example, you will see no tenses, plurals, or subject-verb agreement), but there are also plenty of pitfalls that will trip up the unsuspecting beginner (for example, you will encounter tones, measure words and discourse particles, which do not feature as strongly in European languages.) In addition, the complexity of the writing system often daunts newcomers, as Chinese is one of the few languages in the world that does not use an alphabet or a syllabary; instead, thousands of characters are used, each representing a word or a part of a word. The government of China has developed a system of writing Standard Mandarin pronunciation in the Roman alphabet, known as Hanyu Pinyin or pinyin (汉语拼音/漢語拼音, "spelling according to sounds"). Hanyu Pinyin is used to write out Chinese words phonetically, so helps learners of Chinese with their pronunciation.
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