What exactly is Mandarin Chinese?

Question

They are considering offering it as an elective @ my highschool next year..

I know it's a language..i just wasnt sure if or not there were different types of the chinese language. oh and thanks, but i am in 9th grade

Answer 1

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mandarin.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China <<< dialects in china

they are dozens of dialects spoken by chinese. but mandarin is the standard for writing, also, mandarin is the official national language in china.

Answer 2

Chinese has 4 major dialects, and 2 of those major dialects are rather more major than the other two, Cantonese and Mandarin. Mandarin is the more commonly used dialect. Of course, even if you learn Mandarin fluently there's still going to be a huge population of people speaking it that you wont be able to understand. In each major dialect also lies thousands upon thousands of smaller dialects, so much so that people from different towns can have trouble understanding each other. As well the language is extremely inefficient, the same sentence can have many different meanings based on the inflection and intonation, many varying meanings. As well the only words for numbers they have are 1, 10, 100, 1000, etc.. so if they want to work out a number between those as they often had to when my father went to China for some business, it usually took them about 5-10 minutes. Not only that but the text system is extremely inefficient, see we have a system of 26 letters that we can freely use to assemble words as each letter represents certain phonetic sounds, that's an efficient text system, Chinese is different, in Chinese single strokes can represent entire words and instead of having symbols represent phonetic sounds, they have symbols represent such a wide variety of things that it's nearly impossible to work the text system out. In fact the chinese keyboard has 4 shift keys, where every key can have 4 possible functions. So now you've distinguished between Mandarin and Cantonese. Mandarin is used by the general populace of China more often, however Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong and southern china, and this is where all of the business is, so if you want to do business with the chinese, either get a translator, or learn Cantonese.

Answer 3

there is not any language spoke of as chinese language. There are over 2 hundred languages spoken in China and infinite dialects. Mandarin is the English call for what the chinese language call putonghua. it incredibly is seen to be conventional chinese language, yet purely approximately fifty 3% of chinese language human beings incredibly talk it. eastern is a very separate, unrelated language.

Answer 4

There are two main types of Chinese which are Mandarin and Cantonese. Of the two, Mandarin is a little bit more common and a little bit more practical in terms of business and so on because they speak Mandarin in Hong Kong. Most Chinese language films you see are in Mandarin. If you are thinking of taking it you should know that it is hard but if you put in the hours it will serve you the rest of your life because China is going to be a major Superpower in the next century.

Answer 5

It's a specified dialect of chinese language.
It implies the teaching of verbal mandarin and simplified writings. The writing is shared by all within mainland China whenever written text is used but spoken dialects varies from region to region, and mandarin is the officially designated dialect of China.

Answer 6

Mandarin Chinese is the national language of China, Taiwan, and is an officially recognized language in Singapore.
It was first spoken in the north part of China (Beijing and such).

Answer 7

I believe, Mandarin is a section of China. Like here in America you could study about the south, or new england or midwest. They have different dialects in different parts of the country, just like we do. Some areas fish, some farm, some have cattle, etc. I think it sound like a very interesting class. Enjoy!

Answer 8

Its a foreign language and if you didn't know this then you need to go back and repeat the 9th grade.