Where you’ll find many Chinese speakers, speaking a form of Chinese (either Mandarin or a Chinese dialect): Canada, and the US, particularly in California and in New York. These inscriptions gave hints about the ancient language’s phonetics, such as the discovery that Old Chinese included heavy breathing for differentiating consonants. The Chinese don’t use this term a lot. FluentU isn’t just about watching videos, though—it’s about learning and actively practicing the language you hear in the videos with interactive subtitles, flashcards and vocabulary lists. We already discussed how it’s spoken by nearly 900 million people and that it’s the official language of three countries. This term is used in China to refer the Chinese language in general. However, Shanghainese Wu is the most common. Chinese intonation is a help and hindrance for those learning it from another language because if Chinese was spoken atonally, it’d be very hard to differentiate between many phrases. 普通话 literally means the “common language”. The Chinese language is the group of languages used by Chinese people in China and elsewhere. First of all, why should China using Chinese(simple)? Thanks for subscribing! If your goal is to be able to communicate with the largest number of Chinese speakers, then, without a doubt, you should learn Mandarin. The capital of Guangdong, Guangzhou, was once named Canton, hence the name Cantonese. (Download). However, despite being closely related, these different languages are mutually unintelligible. Let’s take a look at the history of China’s written language and original spoken languages. Ancient colonization is the main reason behind the fact many Chinese speakers live in North America. This is my frist time to answer the question in quora. Many believe that Chinese is a monosyllabic language, which presumably means that every word in Chinese consists of a single syllable, like the English words but, aim, quick, work, crime, laugh, and unlike the wor… Get started today! Click here to get a copy. About 5% of the Chinese living in China speak a form of Xiang. Chinese exists in a number of varieties that are popularly called dialects but that are usually classified as separate languages by scholars. You can find many Asian and Chinese communities in Northern America. The Chinese (or 'Sinitic') languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. It’s also the official language of Taiwan and one of Singapore’s four official languages. Chinese characters have a meaning independently of the sounds you can make to describe them. When you look at it closely, there are actually over 200 dialects of Chinese! It’s spoken by about 37 million people, which makes it one of the most endangered dialects of the eight primary ones. Since many Chinese “dialects” are in fact mutually unintelligible—meaning, two speakers of two different dialects can’t understand one another—they should be considered languages. The media, the government, and the officials all speak 普通话. Xiang is also known as Hunanese. People who speak dialects of the 客家话 kèjiāhuà Hakka group are scattered all over Southern China, from Sichuan to Taiwan, particularly in some parts of the Guandong and Fujian provinces. Besides opening your mind and making you smarter, Ninchanese, the most effective way to learn to speak Mandarin. Mandarin is now China’s official language and a key to most of Asia. For a fun way to discover written Chinese, The earliest traces of Chinese appeared almost 3000 years ago and is considered one of the oldest surviving languages. Indeed, people often say that the Chinese write in pictures. Many of the oral dialects are mutually unintelligible—meaning they’re so different from one another that speakers of one can’t understand speakers of another. As you’ve seen above, it’s certainly based on more organic varieties of Chinese, but ultimately, the language used in Chinese textbooks, on TV, on the radio … Because of the obvious radical difference between the way that the Chinese write and the way that we write, many myths have grown up, not just around China's writing system, but around its language as a whole and around China's people. This irked me because I wasn’t learning Chinese; I was learning Mandarin. If you have a product or service suitable, translating and localizing into Chinese is a no-brainer. Mandarin Chinese has five tones, and other Chinese languages can have more. Of all the main dialect groups that make up the Chinese language, this dialect is usually the dialect people know the least about. But this can be a difficult concept to grasp, especially for beginners and people who haven’t had experience with the language. Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world, with 898 million speakers. Cantonese is particularly prevalent in South -East China: Guangzhou, Hong Kong and abroad. • Regardless of the number of dialects under the Chinese language, most non-Chinese normally refers to all these dialects only as Chinese. Early characters were drawn to resemble objects. China has always used characters for its writing system, and nowadays, a typical full-length dictionary contains 40,000 of them. In the West, you can also hear the Chinese language referred to as Standard Chinese, also called Modern Standard Mandarin. This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you One of the most used dialects in China is 五华 Wǔ huá, or Wu. Read on for answers to your burning questions. 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