Chinese language
The Chinese language is one of the major East Asian languages. It is in fact the most widely spoken language in the entire world, a fact that people from all sorts of fields ranging from business to culture cannot dismiss. About one-fifth of the world speaks the Chinese language, and for an individual wanting to establish a connection with this huge portion of the world’s population, studying the Chinese language is necessary.
The peculiar thing about the Chinese language is that it features many variations depending on which region of China and the rest of the world it is spoken. As an example, the so-called “Standard Chinese” is based largely on Beijing dialect of Mandarin and is the official language of China. Other very important areas of the Sinosphere speak different variations as well with Cantonese being the predominant dialect of Hong Kong and Macau and Hokkien, a Min Nan Chinese dialect, a major variant spoken in the Fujian province, Taiwan and countries in Southeast Asia such as Singapore and Malaysia.
Chinese is not a phonetic language and makes use of a pictographic or symbolic script in writing known as Han characters or Hanzi, and therefore the approach to learning Chinese reading and writing is rather different. Learning Chinese can therefore be demanding but the rewards for accomplishing it are great.
