Language Profile Mandarin
Mandarin ( 官話 ) is spoken by over 885 million people as a native language.
In English, Mandarin can refer to either of two distinct concepts:
- To Standard Chinese or Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu / Hanyu), which is based on the particular Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin functions as the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, the official language of the Republic of China(Taiwan), and one of the four official languages of Singapore. ‘Chinese’ — in practice Standard Mandarin — is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
- To all of the Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and south-western China.
The English term comes from the Portuguese mandarim or Dutch mandarijn (meaning councilor or minister); it is a translation of the Chinese term Guānhuà (simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話), which literally means the language of the mandarins (imperial magistrates).
Writing: The writing system for almost all the varieties of Chinese is based on a set of written symbols that has been passed down with little change for more than two thousand years. Each of these varieties of Chinese has developed some new words during this time, words for which there are no matching characters in the original set. While it is of course possible to invent new characters (as was done to represent many elements in the periodic table), a more common course of development has been to borrow old characters that have fallen into disuse on the basis of their pronunciations. There are currently around 49000 characters in varying degrees of use.
Much like in Japan where a simplified list of characters for everyday use was introduced, there is a list of “simple” Chinese characters numbering 2000 which should be learned as a priority.
Learning Mandarin is easy because:
Mandarin sentence order is similar to English - but simpler, having no inflections (thus no irregularities) also with gender, number, tense, etc. are optional, whereas they are obligatory for most of the world's languages.
Learning Mandarin is challenging because:
Aside from the obvious difference in written form, spoken production will require a lot of work because Mandarin is a tonal language. This means that tones are used to distinguish the meaning between words. Correct tonal pronunciation is essential to understanding because of the numerous words that differ only by tone. There are 4 tones in Mandarin – the high level, the rising, the dipping and the falling tone. Mastering the tones can be quite a challenge!
Mandarin with Cactus:
Cactus provides Mandarin language training as 1:1 programs, closed groups for in-house company training, full-immersion courses, online courses, self-study, and on public evening courses.