Welcome to the Chinese language —the 1st most spoken language in the whole wide world with over 3,000 years of history! 'Sure, you'd say, there are 1,4 billion people in China, no wonder it's the most spoken one.' But also add to that more than 40 million people learning the language worldwide. Plus, get this:
- In Japan, the most popular foreign language after English is Chinese.
They have approximately 2 million Chinese learners. - South Korea has the largest population of Chinese language learners in the world!
The number is estimated at around 10.6 million. - France now has more people studying Chinese than anywhere else in Europe.
In 2010, 750,000 people from around the world took the Official Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK). In 2013, this number grew up to 5 million people, and it only keeps growing from year to year.
Chinese, or Hànyǔ (汉语), is the native language of the Han (native to China, especially as distinguished from non-Chinese elements in the population) nationality of China. It has many different dialects, thus naming a language simply "Chinese" is somewhat misleading.
The vast majority of China's population (around 70%) speaks so called Standard Chinese, or Pǔtōnghuà (literally "common speech"), which is a standardized form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the official language of China and Taiwan. Mandarin is also spoken in Indonesia, Brunei, Thailand, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, and Mongolia.
The word Mandarin has nothing to do with the citrus fruit. It comes, via Portuguese, from the Sanskrit word mandari ("commander") as originally it was the language spoken by Chinese officials. There are 8 different dialects of Mandarin, of which the mostly used one is the Beijing dialect. Besides Mandarin, there are 6 more varieties of Chinese:
- Wu (including the Shanghainese and Suzhounese variants) —6%
- Yue (including the Cantonese and Taishanese variants) —4.5%
- Min (including the Hokkien and Fuzhounese variants) —5%
- Hakka (Kejia)
- Xiang (Hunanese)
- Gan (Jiangxinese)
So if you hear someone say they speak Chinese, chances are they mean the Mandarin dialect, i.e. Standard Chinese. Otherwise, wait for a name of a dialect to be dropped. And when it is said that Chinese is spoken by more people on earth than any other language today, it also implies precisely the Mandarin dialect.
The things that are common for the great many (more than 2,000!) of dialects existing in China (which are, fyi, mutually incomprehensible) are:
- tones (from 2 up to 12, depending on a dialect)
- same written characters (pronounced differently, though, again depending on a dialect)!
The biggest difficulty in learning Chinese for a person who has never heard of tones would be acquiring that brand new habit to pronounce every single syllable with a specific tone (4 of them in Mandarin). Use a wrong tone, and the word changes or completely loses its meaning.
The second biggest challenge is going to be, of course, the Chinese characters. Yes, they are super tricky and various. As opposed to European languages, Chinese doesn't have an alphabet! Say, whaaat???
How then does Chinese work? Here are 10 most important points for you:
- Chinese words consist of special characters (ones you normally see), or logograms, called hanzi.
- Characters do not represent sounds but ideas; each of them has a meaning (or several meanings).
- All characters pronounced as a syllable.
- They rarely stand alone to make words.
- Chinese words tend to appear as a combination of 2, 3 or more characters (> 70%).
- All Chinese characters are built up from strokes —all those lines— from 1 to 57 (!) in a character.
- There are 8 basic types of strokes.
- Stroke order is important for clear writing.
- There are 214 "standart pieces" used to create all the characters, called radicals.
- There are over 50,000 characters in total, but to socialize you only need to know 2,500-4,000 of them.
This is a recap, anyway. There is definitely more to say about the Chinese characters.
For teaching foreigners the pronunciation of words, Chinese may be written with a Roman-based alphabet of 26 letters called pinyin. Tones in this system are marked by four special diacritical marks. You actually can learn pinyin in a day. Beware, though, not to over-rely on it —it's a help aid, not a goal.
Let's see some examples.
So this is, in a nutshell, most important intel on how Chinese works —without alphabet, with thousands of characters, with tones, and strokes, and pinyin. You will find out in the next episodes that even the Chinese people not always know how to spell even most common words correctly, especially now that technology took over. Because typing in Chinese is so different from writing it by hand.
Now we are ready to face the music! Chinese strikes again in the next Episode!
干杯! Gān bēi! Cheers!
"Love Chinese, love the article! Say Shénmeeeee? :)"
Discover more about Chinese and other languages at langventure.strikingly.com!
