Thread: Chinese Vs. Mandarin, Simplified Vs. Traditional

Originally Posted by mariacecilia

Is it difficult to learn Chinese? What do you think?

Well i teach english and chinese, it is difficult,weird for us pronunciation, tones,characters but is so challenging and at the end you enjoy it.
Try! you wonīt regret

if you know "Mandarin" you might get yourself understood in many places across China (specially in Beijing and Shangai), but thereīs about 52 dialects! And in many provinces people only speaks their own dialect and they donīt even know "Mandarin". Mandarin is the "official" language learned at school, but many people donīt even know about it and never use it.
People going to high school might speak the dialect at home or with their grandparents and Mandarin for "special occasions".
Itīs hard to learn, to me, pronunciation is really hard, since thereīs so many tones, if you just mispronounce something you end up saying a totally different thing!
I love it though, and I love Chinese people, Iīd say Chinese people are one of the most friendly peoples in the world.

Originally Posted by Hebe

I heard in India there are about 14 dialects. How amy dialects are there in the chinese Language ?

Many of the languages spoken in India aren't actually dialects, but completely separate languages, and in some cases they have entirely different writing systems. Some languages, like Hindi or Punjabi, are related and belong to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family, while others, like Tamil or Telugu, belong to the Dravidian language family. A lot of Indians use one language at home and a different one at work, or in other places where they might come into contact with speakers of other languages. In many cases speakers of different languages use either Hindi or English, both of which are official, to communicate. Hindi is the most widely-spoken, but I think it's still only spoken by about half the population (as either a native or second language), maybe even less.

Mandarin or simplfied Chinese is the offical languages used across mainland China, and tradtional Chinese is the languae used in Taiwan province, Hongkong, Macao and Chinese people lived in oversea, actually simlfied means simpled the writing of many Chinese words compare to tradtional Chinese since it is adopted by China government from January 1955.