Learning to speak Chinese

You can only really learn a foreign language by hearing it spoken. This is the most effective language-learning program to use. Language learning with an audio CD or with mp3 disks allow you to understand the language as a child would understand it. When you were learning English, could you speak before you knew how to conjugate verbs? Of course you could. That same learning process is what audio language learning replicates. Listening to language audio CDS in your car while you are driving, or listening with your iPod or mp3 player, audio language learning is the best way to learn a foreign language.

About the Chinese Language

Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees.Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by some linguists and Sinologists.

Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue.

The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin , based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language . Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan and in Southeast Asia Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages.

From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguistsrefer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family

Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen , while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu )—this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one—albeit internally very diverse—ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing dialect.

Standard Mandarin

Standard Mandarin, or Standard Chinese, known by various names to native speakers, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan, and is one of the four official languages of Singapore.

The phonology of Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, a large and diverse group of Chinese dialects spoken across northern and southwestern China. The vocabulary is largely drawn from this group of dialects. The grammar is standardized to the body of modern literary works written in Vernacular Chinese, which in practice follows the same tradition of the Mandarin dialects with some notable exceptions. As a result, Standard Mandarin itself is usually just called "Mandarin" in non-academic, everyday usage. However, linguists use "Mandarin" to refer to the entire language. This convention is adopted in this article.

Standard Mandarin is officially known

* in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau as Putonghua
* in Taiwan as Guoyu, and unofficially in Hong Kong as Gwok Yu
* in Malaysia and Singapore as Huayu

In other parts of the world, the three names are used interchangeably to varying degrees, Putonghua being the most common.

The name Guoyu received official recognition in 1909, when the Qing Dynasty determined Standard Mandarin as the "national language". The name Putonghua also has a long, albeit unofficial, pedigree. It was used as early as 1906 in writings by Zhu Wenxiong to differentiate a modern, standard language from classical Chinese and Chinese dialects.

For some linguists of the early 20th century, the Putonghua, or "common tongue", was conceptually different from the Guoyu, or "national language". The former was a national prestige dialect or language, while the latter was the legal standard. Based on common understandings of the time, the two were, in fact, different. Guoyu was understood as formal vernacular Chinese, which is close to classical Chinese. By contrast, Putonghua was called the "the common speech of the modern man", which is the spoken language adopted as a national lingua franca by conventional usage. The use of the term Putonghua by left-leaning intellectuals such as Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun influenced the People's Republic of China government to adopt that term to describe Standard Mandarin in 1956. Prior to this, the government used both terms interchangeably Huayu, or "language of the Chinese nation", originally simply meant "Chinese language", and was used in overseas communities to contrast Chinese dialects against foreign languages. Over time, the desire to standardise the variety of Chinese spoken in these communities led to the adoption of the name "Huayu" to refer to standard Mandarin. This name also avoids choosing a side between the alternative names of Putonghua and Guoyu, which came to have political significance after their usages diverged along political lines between the PRC and the ROC. It also incorporates the notion that Mandarin is usually not the national or common language of the areas in which overseas Chinese live.

Cantonese

Yue is a primary branch of the Chinese language comprising a number of dialects spoken in southern China mainly in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, Hong Kong and Macau, and in various overseas communities. The English name "Cantonese" is sometimes taken to refer to the dialect of Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau, which has emerged as the prestige variety of Cantonese. The issue of whether Yue should be regarded as a language in its own right or as a dialect of a Chinese language depends on conceptions of what a language is. Like the other primary branches of Chinese, Yue is considered to be a dialect of a single Chinese language for ethnic and cultural reasons, but is also considered a language in its own right because it is mutually unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese.

The areas with the highest concentration of speakers are Guangdong and parts of Guangxi in southern mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau; with Cantonese- and Taishanese-speaking minorities in Southeast Asia, Canada, and the United States. In 1912, shortly after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the founding fathers of the republic met to decide which language should be spoken in the new China. Mandarin Putonghua was then a northern dialect spoken by the Manchurian officials. Many perceived it as an 'impure form' of Chinese. Many revolutionary leaders met including Sun Yat-sen and had a great debate that eventually led to a formal vote. Cantonese lost out by a small margin of the vote to Putonghua. Though some historians still argue about the authenticity of the story or event. The popularity of Cantonese-language media and entertainment from Hong Kong have since led to a wide and frequent exposure of Cantonese to large portions of China and the rest of Asia. Cantopop and the Hong Kong film industry are prominent examples of modern Cantonese language media.

In the People's Republic of China, the national policy is to promote Putonghua. While the government does not stop the people from promoting Cantonese local culture, it also does not support it either. Occasionally there are news of kids getting punished for speaking Cantonese in schools.

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