Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world. About 1.1 billion people speak it, mostly in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. That is more than three times the number of people who speak English as a first language. Mandarin is the official language of China and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Mandarin uses Chinese characters instead of an alphabet. Each character stands for a syllable and usually a whole word or idea. The character 山, for example, means "mountain." You can almost see three peaks in its shape. The character 木 means "tree," and two of those side by side, 林, means "forest." Some characters are pictures of what they mean. Others combine smaller pieces to give hints about meaning or sound.

There are tens of thousands of Chinese characters, but most people only need to know a few thousand. To read a newspaper, you need to recognize about 3,000 of them. Chinese kids spend many years of school learning characters, writing them stroke by stroke in the correct order.

Mandarin is a tonal language. That means the pitch of your voice changes the meaning of a word. Mandarin has four main tones plus a neutral tone. The syllable "ma" can mean five different things depending on how you say it. Said with a flat high pitch, 妈 means "mother." Said with a falling then rising pitch, 马 means "horse." Mixing them up makes for funny mistakes.

The grammar is simpler than you might expect. Verbs do not change to show past, present, or future. Instead, speakers add small words or time clues. "I eat" and "I ate" use the same verb. Nouns do not change for singular or plural either.

To help people learn, China created a system called Pinyin in the 1950s. Pinyin spells out Mandarin words using the Roman alphabet, the same letters used in English. The capital city of China, 北京, is written "Beijing" in Pinyin. Pinyin is how most kids in China first learn to read, and it is how most foreign students start learning Mandarin.

Mandarin has changed over thousands of years, but Chinese characters connect modern speakers to writing from the past. A reader today can recognize many characters carved on bones from more than 3,000 years ago, back when the Shang dynasty ruled China. Few living languages have a written history that long.