Introduction to Learning Chinese Mandarin

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Learning Chinese language has become more and more important with the growth of the Chinese economy. There is about one fifth of the population in the world that speaks Chinese language. To learn Chinese language seems to be much more difficult than to learn other languages, as Chinese characters cannot be spelled out with alphabets; the Chinese characters can only be visually comprehended. In other words, spoken Chinese characters and the written Chinese characters are not phonetically related. The grammar of Chinese language, however, is relatively simple. Almost all Chinese words have only one grammatical form, which makes Chinese language not only grammatically logical, but also pragmatic, related to the particular way of Chinese thinking.

History of Chinese language

The earliest examples of written Chinese language are found on the oracle bones used in divination rites during the Shang dynasty in 1500 BC. Even 3,500 years ago Chinese language was already a sophisticated language with an extensive vocabulary. Nearly 2,500 separate characters have been found on bone fragments from the Shang and Yin dynasties. Among them, 600 have been identified. Although the style of writing then was not the same as in the modern language, many characters are still recognizable.

For learning Chinese today, the number of words needed for everyday living is about 3,000, but a working vocabulary adequate for reading newspapers is 7,000 characters. The Shuo Wen Dictionary ( 說文解字 ) of the Han dynasty (207 BC–220 AD) contained 9,353 words. The Kang Xi( 康熙 ) dictionary of the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911) contained 40,545. The Zhong Hua dictionary, compiled in the early 1911 of the Republic of China, includes about 50,000 words.

Spoken Chinese

There are seven major dialects and many minor dialects of Chinese language spoken in China. The seven major dialects are Yue (also called Cantonese), Hakka, Min (also called Hokkien or Min-nan), Xiang, Gan, Wu (also called Shanghainese) and Mandarin. Spoken dialects differ substantively to the extent that a speaker of Mandarin is unable to understand Cantonese or other southern dialects. Despite the different dialects, Chinese characters are universally used as the written language.

Learning Chinese language, in most cases, is referring to learning Mandarin. There were over 800 million people speaking Mandarin in China. It outweighs other Chinese dialects in number of speakers. Mandarin is also the official language of People Republic of China.