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The Chinese Language

The official language of China, known in English as Mandarin, is the most widely spoken language in the world. Mandarin refers to itself as "putonghua" or "the common language", as different regions in China also speak Cantonese, Shanghainese, Sichuanese, and a great many other minority languages and dialects. The vast majority of these share the same writing system, commonly called "Chinese characters". So even though a word may be pronounced differently in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing in the native dialects of those cities, it's written exactly the same way.

Chinese characters evolved over thousands of years from early pictographs to the complex and beautiful system we see today. The art of calligraphy is revered; how someone forms their writing is said to reveal much about them and their character, much as any artwork reveals the artist. Many old and commonly held beliefs about characters (such as allegedly being incompatible with the computer age, or all being "little drawings" of what they represent) are completely untrue and in fact Chinese characters show no sign of going out of fashion.

Knowledge of how to say even a few Mandarin words will greatly increase the pleasure of a Chinese business trip or holiday. For written Chinese, it is commonly accepted that recognition of around 3,000 of the most frequently used characters is enough to "get the gist" of a newspaper or similar publication.