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Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语; traditional Chinese : 漢語; pinyin : Hànyǔ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文; Zhōngwén; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages [ d ] spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak ...
Mandarin ( / ˈmændərɪn / ⓘ MAN-dər-in; Chinese: 官话; pinyin: Guānhuà; lit. 'officials' speech') is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China.
There are several hundred languages in China.The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population.
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is English, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean. [28] According to the Foreign Service Institute , a native English speaker needs over 2,200 hours of intensive study, taking 88 weeks (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. [ 29 ]
Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese among other varieties, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, and is mostly spoken within Chinese-American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California and New York. [ 6] Around 2004, over 2 million Americans spoke varieties of Chinese, with ...
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