The very complicated ancient Chinese sound system has been simplified to create Putonghua, now regarded as standard Chinese. It derives from a northern Chinese dialect and has only about 1600 tonal differences, but has become the most widely used form of spoken Chinese. Chinese is a difficult language to speak and understand. The main reason for the difficulty lies with the difference between the written and spoken language. There is no alphabet and there is no link between the sound uttered and the symbol which represents it.
Meaning is shown by a symbol, originally a pictograph, to which a phonetic value has been assigned.
Chinese is a monosyllabic language and each character has its own single syllable pronunciation and its own meaning. To differentiate between words and to help in the formation of new words, four different tonal levels are used. Conversely, in contrast with the small number of phonemes, there are about 45,000-50,000 characters. However, only 10,000 are in common use and only 4000 are used by the mass media. In addition, the word ma has four different meanings depending on the tone in which it is spoken.