In a bid to increase literacy in China, the government has simplified many elements of Chinese characters, making them far easier to memorise. This is not a small achievement given the complexity of the written form of the language, and the low base level of literacy in 1949 at the end of the civil war. If the written form of the language is complex, the spoken variations are just as staggering. There are eight major language groups with some 600 dialects - all sharing the same written form. There are a further 136 non-Chinese languages spoken in China.
All Chinese languages use tones to distinguish different words.
Mandarin, which is spoken in the Beijing region and in northern China generally, has four common tones. Cantonese, spoken in southeastern China, has nine tones and is quite different from Mandarin. A simple word such as 'ma' can have a variety of meaning depending on which tone is used - meaning anything from mother to horse. For all its complexity, the Chinese language has one saving grace - its grammar is fairly straight forward. Word order for English speakers is not unusual.