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What is Chinese? Let's Look at "What is Chinese"

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Chinese is China's gift to the world and so much more.

Chinese is actually a family of languages (Cantonese, Wu, Mandarin and way more). Can you believe that the many dialects(Cantonese, Wu, Mandarin and again so much more) are mutually unintelligible?


So if you were to speak to me in Mandarin and I only spoke Cantonese I would have no clue what you were saying!


So, why are all these "mutually unintelligible languages" in one family? Well because they share an ideographic writing system, that's why.


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  • Chinese is originally the language spoken by the "Han" Chinese and is on of two branches of the sino-tibetan language.
  • 1 in 5 people in the world speak some form of Chinese.
  • Mandarin, also referred to as "standard Chinese" is spoken by more than 850 million people and is the most common form of Chinese by far,  followed by Wu (90 million) and then Cantonese.
  • Chinese is classified as a macro-language with 13 sub-languages or dialects to be proper.
  • Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect and is the official language of China and Taiwan.
  • Chinese (standard Mandarin) is one of 6 official languages of the United Nations.
  • Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers.
  • 3,000 characters at least must be understood to read a newspaper. A well educated Chinese knows 6,000 or more.


Chinese is a family of languages with a lot of history and so much more to learn. If you are interested at an in depth definition of Chinese visit Wikipedia.