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Welcome to Mandarin Book
Thank you for visiting the Mandarin Book Internet Site: one of the leading chinese-english websites, offering an outstsanding array of tools and services for chinese and english language and cultural studies.
Site Map
Background on the Mandarin Language The word "Chinese", actually, does not refer to a single language shared by all Chinese people, rather, it refers to a family of languages and dialects first spoken in different regions of South and Southeast Asia. The main traditional dialect groups of Chinese are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, and Hakka. Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (also called mainland China), the Republic of China (also called Taiwan), and is one of the official languages in Singapore (the others being english, maylay, and tamil). All chinese dialects belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family. The most striking features of the languages are the use of characters in the written language and the usage of tones in speech. All chinese dialects use tone as a word-forming constituent, that is, the same syllable pronounced with different tones will mean different things. Mandarin Chinese makes use of four tones, and other dialects of Chinese may have as many as ten or eleven tones. Chinese writing started as pictographs in history. Since then, the language has evolved and now Chinese characters can be classified into three groups - pictographs, ideographs, and logographs. The average Chinese speaker can recognize and write about 10,000 characters. Only three or four thousand characters are needed to be considered literate (and read newspapers, etc...) With the establishment of the communist party in the Peoples Republic of China in 1948, a few new symbols were introduced to simplify written chinese and to increase literacy. Written Chinese, with these new symbols, is called simplified Chinese. Today, both simplified and traditional writing systems exist side by side. In mainland China, the simplified characters are used; while in Taiwan and the rest of the Chinese speaking world, traditional characters are still used. Chinese is spoken widely throughout the world, mostly where there are chinese people. But 95% of Chinese speakers still reside in China itself. Unlike European languages, all Chinese languages lack conjugation, declension, and have very little inflection. Therefore every word has only one grammatical form. Concepts like plural or past tense are expressed by the context of the sentence and with other key words in the sentences called aspect particles. Chinese is classified as a subject-verb-object (SVO) language, because of the sequence that the subject, verb, and object occur in neutral sentences. English is also a SVO language. Chinese is considered to be a topic-comment language, where the topic of the context of the sentence takes precedence in the sentence. This site is always under construction, so you may not find what you are looking for at this time. Please, feel free to make any suggestions.
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