Mandarin
Huānyíng!
'Welcome!'
Huānyíng!
'Welcome!' 
Introduction Mandarin is the major dialect of China both in terms of number of speakers (about 70 percent of the total population ) and political importance.The term Mandarin is an English translation of Mandarin is the most widely spoken of all Chinese languages. It is used by 867 million people as a first language in a vast The Technically, both Mandarin plays the role of a lingua franca in PRC, Taiwan, and Singapore, and is taught in schools to facilitate communication among people who speak a variety of mutually unintelligible languages and dialects. Since some of the other Chinese languages/dialects are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, many Chinese have to learn it as a second language. Click on the MLA Interactive Language Map to find out where Chinese (all dialects) is spoken in the United States. |
'official language', i.e., the dialect spoken in 
.
area of northern and southwestern mainland China. It is also spoken in 
'common speech' in the People's Republic of China and 
'national language' in Taiwan. The two differ slightly from each other in 
grammar and vocabulary, although both are based on the 
'Chinese language', is also based on the 
Standard Mandarin is the official language of the 
both versions of "school" Mandarin taught in the two countries are often quite different from the Mandarin that is spoken regionally, and both differ from the Beijing dialect in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. 
Dialects
|
Mandarin is usually divided into four main dialect areas:
All Mandarin dialects are mutually intelligible. Click here to learn more about Mandarin dialects. |
Structure
Sound System
|
The pronunciation of Standard Mandarin varies widely along geographical and social lines. People use elements of their native dialect when they speak it. By contrast, television and radio announcers usually attempt to emulate an idealized version of Standard Mandarin. Below is a short description of the phonology of Standard Mandarin usually heard on television or radio broadcasts. Syllable structure Vowels
Consonants
Tone
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
/, /t-t
can appear at the end of syllables.
/, /
/, /t
/ is quite similar to the English /r/. 
/ = ng in song.
Click hereMandarin, like all other Chinese languages, is predominantly an isolating, or analytic, language, meaning that
Word order
|
for 
the most part, words have only one grammatical form. Grammatical functions are expressed through word order, particles, prepositions, and discourse, rather than by suffixes attached to nouns or verbs, such as in Indo-European languages. Because of the lack of inflections, Chinese grammar may appear quite simple compared to that of Indo-European languages, however, Chinese 
Mandarin shares most of its vocabulary with other Chinese languages. Foreign words and concepts are adopted by Most Mandarin words are made up of one or two morphemes. Grammatical categories such as number, person, case, tense, and aspect are not expressed by inflections. The most common morphological device in Mandarin is use of compounds and derivational morphemes. Some examples are given below. Below are some common words and phrases in Mandarin.
Below are the numerals 0-10 in Mandarin.
|
c
reating new compound words that translate the concept behind them. For example, the word for computer is diànnao, (literally 'electric brain'), the word for telephone is diànhuà, (literally 'electric speech'). Transliteration of borrowed words does not work very well in Chinese because Chinese characters are not well-suited to represent foreign sounds, and because their pronunciation differs from dialect to dialect. 
Writing
Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in traditional characters, simplified characters, and in Pīnyīn. Although Chinese has been traditionally written vertically and from right to left, the modern trend is to write it horizontally and from left to right, just as it was done below.
|
The Chinese writing system is described on the 
Mandarin words in English
|
||
Resources |
Click here to find out where Chinese is taught in the United States. Online resources for the study of Mandarin |
 |
How difficult is it to learn Mandarin? Mandarin is considered to be a Category III language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English. |
Copyright 2007 © National Virtual Translation Center