Cool Facts about Mandarin

China is one of the fastest growing business hubs and has great opportunities for expansion. People all over the world are considering to learn Mandarin to help them with doing business in this culturally rich, wealthy country. Here are a few surprising facts about the Mandarin language:

1.     Most spoken language

Mandarin is one the most popular languages in the world, a total of plus/minus 1.3 billion speakers globally. That’s approximately 16% of the world’s total population! There are more native Mandarin speakers in the world than any other language.

2.     The language has over 50, 000 characters

A little embarrassing compared to our 26-letter alphabet I know, but they don’t use all of it. An educated Chinese person will know about 8, 000 Characters and everyday Mandarin typically uses a set of 2,000 - 3,000 characters.

3.     Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language

There are lots of tonal languages in the world, but the Chinese language is by far the most popular. They use four different tones including, flat, rising, falling, rising and falling. Different tones can affect the meaning of different words and other Chinese dialects use as many as nine distinct tones!

4.     Mandarin isn’t the only Chinese language

There are many forms of the Chinese language, Mandarin is just one of the several Chinese dialect groups. Other varieties of Chinese include Wu, Xiang, Cantonese, Putonghua, Min, Hakka, Gan, but Mandarin is the most widely spoken and is also the official language of China.

5.     One of the most challenging languages

There are little similarities between English and Mandarin. They have different writing systems, different pronunciation style and sound and different grammar styles. This makes Mandarin one of the hardest languages to learn for an English speaker. Chinese characters also don’t give clues as to the pronunciation of the words, which adds on to the difficulty.

6.     There are two types of Chinese characters – Traditional and Simplified

Originally there was only traditional Chinese, but these characters were too difficult to understand and to memorize when the Chinese wanted to spread literacy throughout the country in the mid-twentieth century. Then they created new simpler characters similar to the traditional and it became known as simplified Chinese. The majority of people in mainland China uses the simplified version.

Learning the Mandarin language (or only knowing some of these facts) can help you to connect more deeply with the people in your professional and social life. If you want to learn Chinese or if you just find one of the world’s most ancient languages interesting, we hope you found these facts as fascinating as we did!