Chinese = Mandarin + dialects

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Mandarin = standard/official Chinese based on Beijing dialect and spoken by the majority of Chinese people;

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Dialect = a regional variety of a language that is peculiar to a specific area or community. There are dozens of distinct Chinese dialects, for example, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and lots of others. 

 

You will be learning Mandarin Chinese here. 

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Chinese started as a pictorial language.

 

Take a look at the following words in Chinese and try to picture them in real life.

山looks like a mountain with three peaks, it means "MOUNTAIN"

上 means "ABOVE/ON TOP"

下means "BELOW/UNDER"  

卡means "STUCK"

雨means "RAIN", doesn't it look like rain drops on a window pane?

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With time, however, the pictorial components have gone through heavy revisions and only a very small percentage of Chinese characters retains such logographic quality. It will be hard to guess the meaning of most Chinese characters based solely on their shape.

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Mandarin is written in Simplified Chinese.

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Traditional Chinese is more true to ancient Chinese and more complex-looking.

It is still used in areas such as Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. 

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Simplified Chinese, or Mandarin, is more widely used and most of China writes in Simplified Chinese. 

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Here are some examples of traditional Chinese and their simplified version.

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dragon :  龍 (trad) ----> 龙 (simp)

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country：國 (trad) ----> 国 (simp)