Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese, or simply Mandarin, (; ) is the language of government and education of the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, with the notable exceptions of Hong Kong and Macau where a local dialect of Chinese called Cantonese is more often used.
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 big 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 (Pu Tong Hua /Pu Tong Hua ) meaning "common (spoken) language" or Hanyu (Yi Yu /Han Yu ) meaning "language of the Han". In places such as Malaysia, it is known as Huayu (Hua Yu /Hua Yu ). In Taiwan, it is known as Guoyu (Guo Yu /Guo Yu ) 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, while in past centuries most 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.
Writing
Mandarin is written with Chinese characters called Hanzi (Han Zi or Yi Zi ) which literally means "Han characters". Each Hanzi has its own pronunciation and meaning. An ordinary dictionary will contain about 10,000 characters. Spoken Mandarin uses very many compound words, words that combine meanings the way English does in such terms as "machine gun," "fire truck," "playground," etc.
The Hanzi are ideograms: one character means one idea. The various concepts are derived from the ideograms by combining them. Mandarin can also be written phonetically (that is: written as it is spoken) with the Latin alphabet as you really cannot see the spelling from Hanzi characters. That is called transliteration. The most popular transliteration system is called 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, using one to give a general meaning, and the other to represent a sound. For instance, "Ma ma" (mom) is made by adding Nu (nu, human female) to Ma (ma, horse). The "ma" part is only there to represent the sound.
In most dialects of ancient Chinese, one character was generally enough for one word, but modern spoken Mandarin uses mostly compounds like "Ma Ma mama," which is just "mama,"
Other examples show different ways of combining components:
Huo Che huo che (lit. fire vehicle) locomotive, train
Da Ren da ren (lit. big person) adult
Da Kai da kai (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. Due to the loss of sounds, many Chinese words ended up becoming homophones, thus 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 Shi Shi Shi Shi Shi is pronounced "Shi Shi Shi Shi Shi", and every character in the poem is pronounced with the same syllable, but with different tones. In older forms of Chinese, one could have been to tell apart the different characters making up the title, as they could have sounded noticeably different from each other.
Thus, one-character words in Classical Chinese like
became the Mandarin compound words
to clearly distinguish such words from their homophones, otherwise the already mentioned characters could be mistaken for similar sounding characters like
thus making spoken language difficult to understand without the compound words.
Difference between Mandarin (Beijing Accent) and Beijing Dialect
Mandarin is defined and designed based on 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, so China defined Beijing Accent as standard Mandarin.
Beijing also has some local dialects that are not included by Mandarin or standard Chinese language yet. But with Beijing being 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 language. The other dialects, such as Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka etc., have few opportunities to be included into Mandarin or standard Chinese language or be accepted by the whole of China.
The following samples are some Beijing dialects which are not yet accepted as standard Mandarin. Bei Er : bei'er means 'very much'; Ban Suan : bansuan means 'stagger'; Bu Lin : bulin means 'do not worry about'; Cuo : cuo means 'eat'; Chu Liu : chuliu means 'slip'; Da Lao Ye Er Men Er : dalaoyermenr means 'men, males';
The following samples are some Beijing dialects which have been already accepted as Mandarin in recent years. Er Ba Dao : erbadao means 'not very skillful'; Ge Men Er : gemenr means 'good male friends'; Kou Men Er : koumenr means 'parsimony'; Da Xiao Er : daxiao'er means 'since childhood'
Examples
Ni Hao ni hao -hello
Ni Hao Ma ?ni hao ma?-How are you?
Wo wo-me, I
Ni ni -you
Nin nin -you (Used only when out of respect)
Related pages
Chinese language
Standard Chinese (language)
References
Other websites
General Introduction of Mandarin Language
Pinyin Annotator Automatically adds phonetic symbols (pinyin) on top of Chinese characters.
I Love Chinese Learning Chinese Magazine
Free Chinese Character Input Software 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 Free set of systematic lessons for Mandarin Chinese.
Mandarin Language -Citizendium
Sino-Tibetan languages
Tonal languages