Mandarin language
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Mandarin is the language of North China and Taiwan.
Mandarin is a northern Chinese dialect, and one of five major dialects in China.
In China, it is known as Pu Tong Hua 普通话/普通話 meaning "common (spoken) language" and Han Yu 汉语/漢語 meaning "language of the Han.
Overseas, it is known as Huayu. In Taiwan, it is known as Guo Yu 国语/國語 meaning "national language."
It is spoken by over 800 million people around the world, more than any other language.
It is one of the six official languages at the United Nations.
[change] Writing
Mandarin is written with Chinese characters called Hàn Xì (漢字 or 汉字). Each Hànzì is a word, which means that many thousands of characters exist.
Characters are a kind of graphic language, different than English. The correct way is to remember the structure and meaning of every character, not pronunciation because there is very close relationship between meaning and structure of characters. Example: 房(house)=户+方. 房 is a shape-pronunciation character. 户 is for shape and 方 is for pronunciation. 户 means 'door'. 房 means 'A person lives behind a door'. 方 pronunciation is Fang and tone is 1. 房 pronunciation is also Fang, but tone is 2.
[change] 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 make all people to understand 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 different from the other dialects, Beijing is capital city, political, economic, culture and education center of China, more and more new Beijing dialects have been or will be accepted as mandarin or standard Chinese language. (On the contrary, the other dialects, such as Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka and etc, have few opportunity to be included into mandarin or standard Chinese language or be accepted by the whole China.)
The following samples are some Beijing dialects which are not accepted as standard mandarin yet by now. 倍儿: bei er means 'very much'; 拌蒜: ban suan means 'stagger'; 不吝: bu lin means 'do not worry about'; 撮: cuo means 'eat'; 出溜: chu liu means 'slip'; 大老爷儿们儿: da lao ye men means 'man, male';
The following samples are some Beijing dialects which have been already accepted as mandarin in recent years. 二把刀: er ba dao means 'not very skillful'; 哥们儿: ge men er means 'good male friends'; 抠门儿: kou men means 'parsimony'; 打小儿: da xiao er means 'since childhood'
[change] 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
