Learn Chinese - ZapChinese

As a follow up question about the difference between traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese, a ZapChinese visitor emailed me asking how different from each other are Mandarin and Cantonese.

Let me start with Cantonese. Cantonese is a dilect version of Chinese. As a dilect, it does not have its own writing system since it is just a way how people pronounce it. So in the region of Canton (including Hong Kong), people still use Canton as their daily language and most of them can also use Mandarin, the official Chinese pronunciation system.

To generalize a bit from Cantonese, there are in fact a lot of versions of Chinese dilects such as thoese spoken in Shanghai region, Sichuan region, Fujian region. But why people often take Cantonese as a version Chinese? It is because most of the first generation Chinese people that left China to all over the workd are from Canton region.

Again, all these dialects differ only in pronunication but not in writing. To make sure all Chinese from different regions can understand each other, people choose to speak Mandarin since Mandarin is based on the accent of Beijing dilect. Beijing has been China's capital for past hundreds of years. Just like London's accent is the base for English language and Paris accent for French, the dilect in a capital city often becomes the dominant stadard for the country's language for a country. This is also true for Chinese.

So in case, you are considering choose the accent to learn Chinese, I of course would recommned you to follow mandarin system.

Also, Zapchinese.com only provide mandarin pronunciation system.

The following comment is from another Chinese who visited our site.

Although I do not want to change ZapChinese.com's translation becuse I feel
both ways are valid, I would post his opinion here for everyone's reference and
discussion.

"
.....

The greeting phases on your website stated that "你好！”，
and the correspond in english is "Hi, how are you?"

I think it would be an unexact translation from the chinese
to english, because when the chinese people say this greeting phrase they
were not in the expectation of the reply phrase of "Iam fine, and you?".
When they say "你好！”， the most common reply is "你好！”as well.

so, would you mind if I give my opinion here:

GREETING PHASE1:
你好！
Hello!

你好！
Hello!


GREETING PHASE2
你好吗？
Hi, how are you?

我很好，你呢？
Iam very good, and you?

SO,if you put chinese“你好!” “我很好，你呢？”together,
that would be some misunderstanding in chinese, and I think this
combination due to the direct words translation from english to chinese,
but ignore the real chinese language usage.
..." 

Unlike Zapchinese.com where we focus on the Chinese languag, we would like to use this blog to discuss everything related to China.

If you have anything questions about China, please let us know. We will do whatever we can to help. Of course, we may not be the right or only answer to your questions, but we will provide very useful inputs.

For any questions, you can email yi@zapchinese.com

Best!

A Zapchinese.com user asked me how to say the following words. I am happy to post them on a Friday so you can practise them now!


English: Have a good weekend!
Chinese: 周末 愉快! (Pinyin: zhou1 mo4 yu2 kuai4)
Word-by-word: 周末 for weenkend; 愉快 for happy

English: See you next week.
Chinese: 下 周 见. (Pinyin: xia4 zhou1 jian4)
Word-by-word: 下 for Next; 周 for week; 见 for see/meet

If you just start to learn Chinese, you may need to make a decision about what type of Chinese you want to learn. It is not difficult indeed for me to give you my recomendation but I believe you should know the full story.

On top of the myriad local Chinese dialects, there are two official versions of Chinese used by mainland China and Taiwan respectively. We call the version used in Taiwan the "Traditional Chinese" because it has a direct continuity with the thousands of years old Chinese. On the flip side, the version used in mainland China is called "Simplified Chinese". As it is called, you can imagine this version has undergone a process of simplification. Why such a prcess? In 1950's, the newly establish mainly China government adopted this simplification process because the leaders believed that the traditional Chinese was too complicated to learn and use, putting working class people and their children at a great disadvantage in education inequality since they can afford less time and resources on learning. So the deucation department started simplied structure of each Chinese characters so that many complicated characters take less strokes to write. So for simplified Chinese characrters, it is easier to remember and write. This language reform was fundamental and took about 2 decades to finalize.

So what are the exactly differences between mainland China's simplified Chinese and Taiwan's traditional Chinese? Mostly the difference lies in the characters. My guess is that 95% of Chinese characters are different between the 2 versions: one simplier and one more complicated. In addition to that, tradition Chinese and simplified Chinese developed 2 different phonetic system. It is not because they sound different, it is just that they use different symboles to mark the same sound. The mainland China developed a romanized phonetics system to mark the pronounciations while Taiwan uses another one that I do not know much about.

The interesting thing about two versions of Chinese is that once you know one version of it, it is very easy for you to recognize the other version. Therefore, because of business activity and technology, the use of both simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese have penetrated to their opposite side pretty much because of their own characteristics. For example, Simplified Chinese is more and more popular in Taiwan because it is earsier to write. So a lot peole use that in handwriting. At the same time, because traditional Chinese looks nicer and more elegant, they are often more and more used on the media, labels, and advertising in mailand China.

Although such a complication seems daunting to many beginners, I would encourage to start by stick to the simplified Chinese. The following is a list of reasons for my recommendation.

1. Simplified Chinese is literally simplified. So it is easier to learn.
2. Simplified Chinese uses romanized phonetic system and therefore much easier for English speakers to pick up.
3. Simplfied Chinese is official for 1.3 billion people in mainland Chinese. An easy choice for business and career consideration.
4. Once knowing Simplified Chinese, people will have little problem to understand and recognize traditional ones.
5. And last, our powerful Chinese learning site: www.zapchinese.com only covers simplified Chinese.

Do you have a question about Chinese? Write it here and we will be happy to answer it!