Chinese now has earned itself greater status in the World. Chinese language is one of the six official languages used by UN (United Nations). Chinese is a difficult language for most foreigners. But with some efforts foreign people still can master some useful and daily life sentences to be used in their trips to
Beijing China.
Chinese Language-Mandarin
The official language of China is the Mandarin, which is the very name of 'Hanyu' or 'Putonghua', belonging to Sino-Tibetan.Putonghua is a parlance in mainland China. It is the common language of all modern Han nationality people. In Taiwan Province and Hong Kong, it is called 'Guoyu' while in Singapore and Malaysia, it is often called 'Huayu'.
Mandarin is shaped and based on the
Beijing dialect and other dialects spoken in the northern areas of China. Students are often taught mandarin as 'Yuwen' in their schoolbooks. It is beyond all doubt that mandarin is used as a mother tongue by the most people accounting for about one fifth of the world's population. Chinese once had very great influence on some peripheral countries with their languages and characters, such as Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.
English is a required course and universal education in China and has great popularity. Nowadays many Chinese people can speak basic English, especially the youth, students, and staff of service trades like hotels, restaurants, airlines, banks and post offices.In large cities there are more people who can communicate with foreigners in English than smaller towns & cities. Some may master a second foreign language like French, German, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish. However, in rural or remote areas, few people can speak English or other foreign languages.
Dialects in China
With a vast territory and huge population, China has many different dialects which are of great complexity. Divided into official and non-official dialects, they vary between different areas. The official dialects generally refer to the northern dialects, while the non-official dialects are often spoken in the southeast part of the country.
Cantonese is Guangdong Language, which is used in Guangdong Province, Hongkong, and south of Guangxi Region.
Hakka Language is used in Eastern and northern part of Guangdong Province; Western part of Fujian Province; Southern part of Jiangxi Province; Taiwan Province.
Due to the differences between each of the dialects, there are obvious obstacles to people speaking their own dialects and communicating with each other, especially among the non-official dialects.
Chinese Characters
The Chinese character has more than 3,000 years of history. It is a kind of hieroglyphic which originated from carapace-bone-script in the Shang Dynasty (16th - 11th century BC). It then developed into different forms of calligraphic handwritings like large seal script, small seal script, official script, regular script, cursive script and running script.
There are altogether 80,000 Chinese words or so that originate from ancient times; however, only about 3,000 words for daily use are available to express over 99% of the information in written form because a word contains many different meanings. The character is now of two kinds – Simplified and Traditional. Simplified style are often used in mainland China, Singapore, and oversea Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, while the latter is often accepted in Taiwan Province, Hong Kong, Macau and oversea Chinese communities in North America.
Minorities Language
Actually the Mandarin and characters used by Han people are also the common language for other minorities. Among all the 55 ethnic minorities, the people of Hui and Man nationalities also use Mandarin and its characters. 29 ethnic minorities have their own traditional languages like Tibetan, Yi,
Mongol,
Uygur, Kazak, Lahu, Chaoxian and Kirgiz. Some minorities, like
Dai nationality and
Jingpo nationality, use even more than one kind of language and characters.
Learn Chinese
The language barrier now is not a problem at all for those that wish to come to
China. You can learn some Chinese Language.It is nice if you learn some useful Chinese phrases before your planned travel to Beijing
China. Learning some Chinese is a good way of understanding more of its culture. On this page you will learn some basic knowledge of Chinese language. And we also has recommended you an useful Chinese phrase learning website for your practice. Never too old to learn. Don't hesitate! Let's start !
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