Chinese phrasebook
Mandarin Chinese is the official language of China and Taiwan, and is one of the official languages of Singapore, Macau and Hong Kong. In English, it is often just called "Mandarin" or "Chinese". In China, it is called Putonghua (普通話), meaning "common speech", while it Taiwan it is referred to as Guoyu (國語) - "the national language." It has been the main language of education in China (but not Hong Kong) since the 1950s. Standard Mandarin is close to, but not quite identical with, the dialect of the Beijing area. Note that while the spoken mandarin in the above places is the same, the written characters are different. In Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau traditional characters are used, whereas China and Singapore use a simplified derivative.
Culture and History
The word "dialect" means something different when applied to Chinese than it does for other languages. Chinese "dialects" are often mutually unintelligible, as different as, say, Spanish and French and even English, which we would call "related languages" rather than "dialects".
However, while there are different spoken dialects of Chinese, there is only one form of written Chinese, with one common set of characters - mostly. An exception arises where in some spoken dialects, for example Cantonese as used in Hong Kong, more informal phrasings are used in everyday speech than what would be written. Thus, there are some extra characters that are sometimes used in addition to the common characters to represent the spoken dialect and other colloquial words. One additional complication is that mainland China and Singapore use simplified characters, a long-debated change completed by the mainland Chinese government in 1956 to facilitate the standardization of language across China's broad minority groups and sub-dialects. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and many overseas Chinese use the traditional characters. In addition, the Dungan language, which is spoken in some parts of Russia, is considered to be a variant of Mandarin but uses the Cyrillic alphabet instead of Chinese characters.
About one fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language, making it the most widely spoken language in the world. It is a tonal language that is related to Burmese and Tibetan. Although Japanese and Korean use Chinese written characters and a large number of Chinese loanwords, they are not related in a manner that resembles English having a lot of Romance language-derived loanwords. Also, the unrelated Vietnamese language (which uses a distinctive version of the Latin alphabet) language has borrowed many words from Chinese.
Additional languages may have even borrowed so much from Chinese that they have come to be considered Chinese languages. Hokkien/Taiwanese/Ban-lam-gu and Teochew could have "become Chinese" this way.
Note that travellers headed for Hong Kong, Macau or Guangdong will almost certainly find Cantonese more useful than Mandarin.
Chinese, like most other Asian languages such as Arabic, is famous for being difficult to learn but it needn't be. While English speakers would initially have problems with the tones and recognising many different characters (Chinese has no alphabet), the grammar is very simple and can be picked up very easily. Most notably, Chinese grammar does not have conjugation, tenses, gender, plurals or other nigglesome gramatical rules which plague other major languages such as English, French or Japanese.
Pronunciation guide
The pronunciation guide below uses Hanyu pinyin, the official romanization of the People's Republic of China. Until recently, Taiwan used the Wade-Giles system, which is quite different, but has recently officially switched to Tongyong pinyin, which is only slightly different.
Pinyin allows very accurate pronunciation of Chinese if you understand how it works, but the way it uses letters like q, x and even i is not at all intuitive to the English speaker. Studying the pronunciation guide below carefully is thus essential.
Vowels
- a
Didn't find what you were looking for.
Ask for help at the Chinese phrasebook travel forum
This page was last edited at 22:23, on 27 December 2008 by Anonymous user(s) of Wikitravel. Based on work by Anatoli Titarev and Brandon Zubek, Wikitravel user(s) Chinzh, Superdog and Cacahuate, Anonymous user(s) of Wikitravel and others.
Content on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 license
