“1 Chinese Language”

here is really no "1 Chinese language". Different parts of China speak different forms of it, and even different individuals speak a different version.

So why "1 Chinese Language"?

You see, modern technologies have speeded up the frequency of knowledge exchange and we see more and more Chinese learning resources appear on the Internet that keep raising the bar, but it just occured to us that there was no clear, systemized, step-by-step framework that can lead a person from knowing next to nothing about Chinese to picking up speed and being able to study on her own.

What's more, as professional language instructors, we've noticed a recurring pattern from our students... Many of them hastily started learning Chinese without a basic understanding of the language itself.

Definition

People talk about learning Chinese... But are they talking about the same thing?

Maybe not.

You see, many linguists actually view Chinese as a language family, instead of a single language.

"What's the difference?" you ask.

Well, for example, English is a language, and it's a member of Germanic Languages (a group of related languages including German, Dutch, etc.) which further belongs to the Indo-European language family.

Strictly speaking, Chinese (also known as the "Sinitic Language") is one of two branches (the other being "Tibeto-Burman") of the Sino-Tibetan language family, but its diversity makes it resemble a typical language family.

Chinese consists of the following languages/dialects:

Mandarin
Wu
Cantonese
Min
Xiang
Hakka
Gan

Some people may mistaken Chinese as the total sum of Mandarin and Cantonese. This is mainly because Mandarin and Cantonese are the two most popular languages/dialects within and out of China.

Take note that I referred to them as "languages/dialects". Let me explain:

Although they all possess the attributes of a language, they're called "dialects" in China, due to very strong political/cultural reason: The Chinese likes to think they speak a unified language (i.e. "Chinese") that expresses itself through many different dialects. And think about it, it is pretty amazing that the entire country uses the same written language (the reason can be traced back to the first Chinese Dynasty of more than two thousand years ago), even though the same text would sound drastically differently in different parts of China. This means...

Chinese people of a particular "dialect group" typically don't understand another "dialect" at all.

For example, if you visit Shanghai you'll notice the locals speak a language/dialect that's entirely different from Mandarin, because the Shanghai people speak "Shanghainese", which is a member of "Wu". The difference between Wu and Mandarin is pretty much the difference between Dutch and English. On the other hand, if you visit Hong Kong, you'll hear the other version of Chines, namely Cantonese, which sounds like a totally different language from Mandarin, although the written texts of both languages/dialects are similar (not the same).

In other words, if you only learned Mandarin, you'd find yourself at a complete loss among the Shanghai/Hong Kong locals. The neat thing is that majority of Chinese (especially those who live in urban areas) understand and speak (most often with a strong local accent) Mandarin as it's the "official form" of the Chinese language. The analogy is that when you travel to Holland you'll encounter little trouble conversing in English, just as you'll get by pretty well conversing in Mandarin in China.

The "default" Chinese language you're learning or planning to learn is Mandarin, but I just want to show you the bigger picture so that you know "what you're getting into".

Evolution

Just like most languages, Chinese has evolved into something that's very different from its most original form (that is, thousands of years ago).

Just compare Shakespeare and any best-selling book today and you'll know what I mean. Only, the difference in Chinese is even greater.

For example, "Archaic Chinese", the Chinese language that was spoken during the early Zhou Dynasty, was probably still without tones. "Middle Chinese", which was spoken till the 10th century, already exhibited a high degree of diversity.

Even until the 20th century, most Chinese only spoke their dialects which, as I already mentioned, are pretty much different languages if you only consider their spoken form.

This is still true to a large extent in the present China, although the official Chinese is Mandarin, which is based on the dialect of its capital city, Beijing. The southern population of China continue to use their own regional dialects in pretty much every aspect of life, including in schools and offices.

Believe it or not, back then the "standard" spoken Chinese which was based on the dialect of Nanjing, as opposed to today's Beijing-dialect-based Mandarin. Since the 17th century, Qing (the last Dynasty of China) officials had started to conform pronunciation to the dialect of Beijing, which then became the capital city. During Qing Dynasty's last 50 years in the late 19th century, Beijing Mandarin finally replaced Nanjing Mandarin in the imperial court.

While Beijing is the current capital city of China, Nanjing has been the capital city in 6 different Dynasties in the past. Literally, Beijing means "the northern capital" and Nanjing means "the southern capital".

Switching to a new and proven system of learning Chinese, this different language family "on a different branch", is just like putting on a safe tire to drive in a different weather.

Pronunciation

The Chinese words are formed by "characters", and each Chinese character is composed of 3 parts:

Exactly 1 initial consonant
Exactly 1 vowel (which can be a simple vowel or a compound vowel)
1 tone

That's why Chinese is said to be "monosyllabic". This quality may make each Chinese sentence appear to an English-speaker like a string of short interjections of various emotions.

For some reason, the concept of "tonal language" is hard to grasp for certain people. In English, "mother" means mother no matter how you say it, whether you're speaking it with a rising tone (such as in a question) or a falling tone (such as when calling out loud), but in Chinese, the "ma" for "mother" has to go with a steady, not-rising and not-falling tone. If you say it with a rising tone, it could mean "ma" for "numb"; when spoken with a falling tone, it could mean "ma" for scold.

We said "could mean" because "ma" even with one of those tones can still represent many different characters. That's exactly why Pinyin is not sufficient in expressing a Chinese word's meaning. Keep in mind that the Chinese never even used the Latin alphabet until less than 100 years ago.

All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. A few dialects of northern China may have as few as 3tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 10 tones (e.g. 9 tones in Cantonese, although 2 pairs are very close).

Vocabulary

As we already mentioned, written Chinese uses Chinese characters, which are logograms, i.e. each symbol represents a semanteme or morpheme (a meaningful unit of language), as well as one syllable. Chinese characters are divided into 6 categories, and about 4% as pictographs. 82% are phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that may once indicated the pronunciation.

There are currently two standards for Chinese characters: traditional Chinese, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau; and simplified Chinese adopted during the 1950s in Mainland China. The simplified system requires fewer strokes to write certain components and has fewer synonymous characters. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first foreign country to officially adopt the simplified characters. So did the Chinese community of Malaysia later on.

The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is arguably more complicated than in other languages. Spoken Chinese evolved for centuries while written Chinese changed much less. Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was carried out in Classical Chinese, which was drastically different from any spoken form of Chinese, whereas Chinese in the past 50 years has conformed to the spoken form significantly. Because of this, if you read out a Chinese text in last century, the vast majority of Chinese today could understand very little of it.

Grammar

The grammar of Chinese dialects shares a similar system. A key feature of is that all words have only one grammatical form, that is, the language lacks conjugation, declension, or any other inflection. Functions such as number in nouns or tense in verbs are expressed through word order or particles. In other words, where nouns might be distinguished by singular and plural ("woman" and "women") or verbs by number or person ("I go", "he goes"), Chinese words typically don't change at all.

Because of the lack of inflections, Chinese grammar may appear quite simple compared to that of many highly-inflected European languages (e.g. Russian, Latin, etc.), or even the low-scale verb conjugations, for instance, of English (e.g. "swim, swam, swum"). However, Chinese displays a very high level of complexity in its syntax.

Chinese features Subject Verb Object word order, and like many other languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. Even though Chinese has no grammatical gender, it has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring (but not related) languages like Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common all dialects of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping (and the related subject dropping), and the use of aspect rather than tense.