Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese,^[2] or simply Mandarin, (/ˈmændərɪn/ (listen); simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; literally: "speech of officials") is the language of government and education of the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, with the notable exceptions of Hong Kong and Macau, which more often use a local dialect of Chinese that is called Cantonese.

Mandarin is one of five major regional languages of China. It spreads wider than any other regional variety from the whole northern part of China to Yunnan Province in the southwest corner of China. In that huge area, there are many regional differences in vocabulary, so somebody who moves from Beijing to Yunnan could not understand people there who were speaking their own dialect, Yunnanhua. The problem is bigger than for a person in Great Britain or the United States to go to Australia. Therefore, starting in the 1920s, the Chinese government set up a national language based on the Beijing dialect and on the most widely understood words and pronunciations.

Mandarin is a standard language. It is nobody's native language, but a good average between various language forms and a common language everyone can understand and communicate with. Although it is based on the Beijing dialect, it is not the same as Beijing dialect.

Schools use a dialect called Standard Mandarin, Putonghua (普通话/普通話) meaning "common (spoken) language" or Hanyu (汉语/漢語) meaning "language of the Han". In places such as Malaysia, it is known as Huayu (华语/華語). In Taiwan, it is known as Guoyu (国语/國語) meaning "national language." There are some minor differences in these standards.

Mandarin is spoken by over 800 million people around the world, more than any other language. Most people emigrating from the Greater China region now speak Mandarin, but in past centuries, most of them spoke Cantonese or Taishanese, another local Chinese dialect.

Standard Mandarin is one of the six official languages at the United Nations. The others are English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic.

Mandarin is written with Chinese characters called Hànzì (漢字 or 汉字) which literally means "Han characters". Each character has its own pronunciation and meaning. An ordinary dictionary contains about 10,000 characters. Spoken Mandarin uses a large number of compound words. They combine meanings as English does in such terms as "machine gun," "fire truck," and "playground."

The Chinese characters are ideograms: one character means one idea. The various concepts are derived from the ideograms by combining them. Mandarin can also be written phonetically (as it is spoken) with the Latin alphabet as the spelling cannot really be seen from the characters. The most popular transliteration system is pinyin.

Some Chinese characters were originally fairly concrete pictures of the things they represent. As time went on, people chose to write simpler versions that are easier to write but do not look so much like the real thing, just as people sometimes draw stick men rather than drawing people with real-looking bodies, arms, legs, etc. Here are some examples:

Most characters, however, are made by combining pictures by using one to give a general meaning and the other to represent a sound. For instance, "媽 mā" (mom) is made by adding 女 (nǚ, human female) to 馬 (mǎ, horse). The "ma" part is there only to represent the sound.

In most dialects of ancient Chinese, one character was generally enough for one word, but modern spoken Mandarin uses mostly compound words like "媽媽 māma," which is just "mama,"

Other examples show different ways of combining components:

• 火車 huǒ chē (lit. fire vehicle) locomotive, train
• 大人 dà rén (lit. big person) adult
• 打開 dǎ kāi (lit. strike open) open up (door, window, envelope, etc.)

Just as the English used in Great Britain favors "petrol" but the English used in the United States almost always uses "gasoline," different regional languages in China may use different compound words to name the same thing.

In Spoken Mandarin, most words are character compounds because over time Mandarin lost many sounds that existed in earlier forms of Chinese. The loss of sounds has caused many Chinese words to end up becoming homophones, which caused more characters were added to words to tell them apart. For example, the Chinese title of the poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den 施氏食狮史 is pronounced "Shī Shì Shí Shī Shǐ", and every character in the poem is pronounced with the same syllabl but with different tones. In older forms of Chinese, one would have been to tell apart the different characters making up the title, as they would have sounded noticeably different from one another.

Thus, one-character words in Classical Chinese like

became the Mandarin compound words

to clearly distinguish such words from their homophones. Otherwise those characters could be mistaken for similar sounding characters

which would make the spoken language difficult to understand without the compound words.

Mandarin is defined and designed based on the Beijing accent. In China, there are over 600,000 dialects and more accents although they all use Chinese language and characters, but their pronunciation and some expressions are totally different. China must find a standard pronunciation to allow all people to understand each other and communicate. Beijing has been the capital city of China for more than 1,000 years and so China defines the Beijing accent as Standard Mandarin.

Beijing also has some local dialects that are not included by Mandarin or Standard Chinese. Since Beijing is the capital city, as well as the political, economic, cultural, and education center of China, more and more new Beijing dialects have been or will be accepted as Mandarin or Standard Chinese. The other dialects, such as Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka, etc., have few opportunities to be included into Mandarin or Standard Chinese or be accepted by the whole of China.

The following samples are some Beijing dialects that are not accepted as Standard Mandarin. 倍儿: bèi'ér means 'very much'; 拌蒜: bànsuàn means 'stagger'; 不吝: bùlìn means 'do not worry about'; 撮: cuò means 'eat'; 出溜: chūliū means 'slip'; 大老爷儿们儿: dàlǎoyérmenr means 'men, males';

The following samples are Beijing dialects that have been already accepted as Mandarin in recent years. 二把刀: èrbǎdāo means 'not very skillful'; 哥们儿: gēmenr means 'good male friends'; 抠门儿: kōuménr means 'parsimony'; 打小儿: dǎxiǎo'ér means 'since childhood'

• 你好 nǐ hǎo －hello
• 你好吗？nǐ hǎo ma?－How are you?
• 我 wǒ－me, I
• 你 nǐ －you
• 您 nín －you (Used only when out of respect)

• Chinese language
• Standard Chinese (language)

• General Introduction of Mandarin Language Archived 2008-06-02 at the Wayback Machine
• Pinyin Annotator Archived 2007-08-11 at the Wayback Machine Automatically adds phonetic symbols (pinyin) on top of Chinese characters.
• I Love Chinese Learning Chinese Magazine
• Free Chinese Character Input Software Archived 2008-05-07 at the Wayback Machine Google Pinyin Input Software
• Learn Mandarin 11 Free Mandarin learning lessons
• Mandarin Pinyin In order to learn standard Chinese, one must learn its phonetic system first.
• Yellow Bridge An online resource for students of the Chinese language
• Zhongwen Red Archived 2022-03-22 at the Wayback Machine Free set of systematic lessons for Mandarin Chinese.
• Mandarin Language -Citizendium