Chinese

Have you ever come across a language where verbs have one form and do not change according to time, number or inflection?A language that has no cases, genders and nothing agrees with anything else?Have you ever tried a language where you have to sing it to be understood?

From top to bottom: left old script, right simplified script.

Chinese (Hangyu) is the most spoken language in the world in terms of number of speakers with over a billion speakers.That's one sixth of the world's population speaking Chinese.

Listen to Mandarin, the official dialect.

dialects

Actually Chinese is not one language but a group of Chinese,Sinitic dialects/languages which in most most cases are completely different from each other.

Main dialects are Mandarin (800 million speakers),Wu (90 million),Cantonese (70 million) followed by Min (50 million).

The Chinese consider all these languages to be dialects of one language, the single Chinese language, but there are some linguists who do not agree with this and consider them to be separate languages.

the Chinese dialects

and other languages of China

When we say Chinese we usually refer to Mandarin, the official and standard language of the Chinese state which is based on the Beijing dialect and is called putonghua (the common language).

Listen to Cantonese, the native language of Chuckie Chan.

Another popular dialect is Cantonese which is also spoken in Hong Kong.The Kung Fu movies of the 80's ,which were filmed in Hong Kong, are in Cantonese.By the way, Chuckie Chan's mother tongue is Cantonese,who besides that speaks Mandarin and English.

grammar and intonation.

The grammar of Chinese is quite simple compared to the grammars of Western languages since it has no cases,endings,genders,words do not change based on time,etc.Words are usually monosyllabic and disyllabic.

Chinese is a tonal language,unusual for western languages and has four stresses.That is,the same word has different meanings because it is stressed differently:

1st tone: ma1 or mā mother

2nd tone: ma2 or má  

3rd tone: ma3 or mǎ horse

4th tone: ma4 or mà argue

alphabet

The Chinese alphabet has nothing to do with the concept of an alphabet as we know it in our language.Our alphabet has 24 phonetic symbols, while the Chinese alphabet has no letters but ideograms, each of which has a different phonetic value and there are thousands of them.For example, to be able to read a Chinese newspaper with relative ease, one must know 2 to 3 thousand ideograms.

A Latin-based alphabet is also used to write the Chinese language, with the use of symbols or numbers next to the letter to represent the Chinese tones, which is called pinyin.Pinyin is also taught in the early grades of school, alongside the ideograms, since it is simpler and more accurate.

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