As we know that China is the world’s most populated country. We might have visited there and also heard about the the language of China. Do you know anything about the languages that’s spoken there? In China there are at least eight different linguistic groups, in addition to hundreds of dialects and variations. Most of the times they are not mutually understandable. The official language is Mandarin Chinese, bases on the dialect of the ethnic group the Han, originally from the North. That’s the reason Chinese language is called Han Yu(汉语) in Chinese except Zhongwen (中文). In fact there are other several languages spoken there as we also speak in India in different regions. Similarly Mandarin, Wu. Yue, xiang , Min, Gan, Hakka etc . Mandarin is an official spoken language in China, Taiwan and Singapore. Cantonese is an official spoken language in Hong Kong and Macau. Have we ever try to know that Chinese has no verb, tenses, no distinction between singular and plural, and no alphabet? It’s a very surprising and difficult language in the world’s but it is also the most spoken language across world. How is that possible? There definitely will be some features of this language.
1. Chinese speakers across worldwide.
With over a billion native speakers, about 15% of the world’s population speaks Chinese as their mother tongue.
2 Non alphabetical.
The Chinese writing seems very difficult for English speakers to write and remember easily. As we know that Chinese does not have an alphabet. Instead of alphabet it consists of thousands of standalone characters as well as sounds ( Pinyin). So basically this language is based on phonetics called Pinyin( Sounds)
3. No Singular/Plural Concepts
As we generally use in English, in which plural nouns are marked with an -s, Chinese nouns retain the same form regardless of whether or not they are in singular or plural form.
4. Variations in Tones
Chinese is a tonal language, It means that every sound has a different four tones and each tones have a different meaning.
5. UN official language.
Chinese joins English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish as one of the six official UN languages.
6. Chinese characters.
The Chinese language contains a vast amount of characters — and some advanced dictionaries place the number is even higher! But rest assured: about 98% of written Chinese consists of the same 2,500 characters, so you can successfully read the newspaper even if you can “only” identify about two or three thousand.
7. Verbs in Chinese.
Chinese verbs aren’t changed as per tense like in English and many other languages. Instead, adverbs like “before” and “after” indicate temporal relations. This allows you to focus more on other, more pressing issues, such as memorizing 2,500 different characters.
8. Mandarin vs Sanskrit.
The English word “Mandarin” is an official language of the Chinese dynasty It comes from the Portuguese word mandarim, which is derived from the Malay word menteri, which in turn originates from the Sanskrit word mantrin, which means “minister”. Among Chinese speakers, Mandarin Chinese is often called Guóyǔ (国语), which means “national language”, or Pǔtōnghuà (普通话), which means “common speech”. In fact the most of the sounds are in Chinese from Sanskrit only which all has like Hindi tones.