Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin is written with Chinese characters called Hànzì (漢字 or 汉字) which literally means "Han characters". Each Hànzì has its own pronunciation and meaning. An ordinary dictionary will contain about 10,000 characters. Spoken Mandarin uses very many compound words, words that combine meanings the way English does in such terms as "machine gun," "fire truck," "playground," etc.

The Hanzi are ideograms: one character means one idea. The various concepts are derived from the ideograms by combining them. Mandarin can also be written phonetically (that is: written as it is spoken) with the Latin alphabet as you really cannot see the spelling from Hanzi characters. That is called transliteration. The most popular transliteration system is called Pinyin.

Some Chinese characters were originally fairly concrete pictures of the things they represent. As time went on, people chose to write simpler versions that are easier to write but do not look so much like the real thing, just as people sometimes draw stick men rather than drawing people with real-looking bodies, arms, legs, etc. Here are some examples:

Archaic	Seal script	Traditional Modern	Simplified	Pinyin	Gloss
		人	—	rén	human
		女	—	nǚ	female human
		子	—	zǐ	child
		日	—	rì	sun
		月	—	yuè	moon
		山	—	shān	mountain
		川	—	chuān	river
		水	—	shuǐ	water
		雨	—	yǔ	rain
		竹	—	zhú	bamboo
		木	—	mù	tree
		馬	马	mǎ	horse
		鳥	鸟	niǎo	bird
		龜	龟	guī	turtle
		龍	龙	lóng	dragon

Most characters, however, are made by combining pictures, using one to give a general meaning, and the other to represent a sound. For instance, "媽 mā" (mom) is made by adding 女 (nǚ, human female) to 馬 (mǎ, horse). The "ma" part is only there to represent the sound.

In most dialects of ancient Chinese, one character was generally enough for one word, but modern spoken Mandarin uses mostly compounds like "媽媽 māma," which is just "mama,"

Other examples show different ways of combining components:

• 火車 huǒ chē (lit. fire vehicle) locomotive, train
• 大人 dà rén (lit. big person) adult
• 打開 dǎ kāi (lit. strike open) open up (door, window, envelope, etc.)

Just as the English used in Great Britain favors "petrol" but the English used in the United States almost always uses "gasoline," different regional languages in China may use different compound words to name the same thing.

In Spoken Mandarin, most words are character compounds because over time Mandarin lost many sounds that existed in earlier forms of Chinese. Due to the loss of sounds, many Chinese words ended up becoming homophones, thus more characters were added to words to tell them apart. For example, the Chinese title of the poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den 施氏食狮史 is pronounced "Shī Shì Shí Shī Shǐ", and every character in the poem is pronounced with the same syllable, but with different tones. In older forms of Chinese, one could have been to tell apart the different characters making up the title, as they could have sounded noticeably different from each other.

Thus, one-character words in Classical Chinese like

became the Mandarin compound words

to clearly distinguish such words from their homophones, otherwise the already mentioned characters could be mistaken for similar sounding characters like

thus making spoken language difficult to understand without the compound words.

Mandarin is defined and designed based on Beijing accent. In China, there are over 600,000 dialects and more accents although they all use Chinese language and characters, but their pronunciation and some expressions are totally different. China must find a standard pronunciation to allow all people to understand each other and communicate. Beijing has been the capital city of China for more than 1,000 years, so China defined Beijing Accent as standard Mandarin.

Beijing also has some local dialects that are not included by Mandarin or standard Chinese language yet. But with Beijing being the capital city as well as the political, economic, cultural and education center of China, more and more new Beijing dialects have been or will be accepted as Mandarin or standard Chinese language. The other dialects, such as Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka etc., have few opportunities to be included into Mandarin or standard Chinese language or be accepted by the whole of China.

The following samples are some Beijing dialects which are not yet accepted as standard Mandarin. 倍儿: bèi'ér means 'very much'; 拌蒜: bànsuàn means 'stagger'; 不吝: bùlìn means 'do not worry about'; 撮: cuò means 'eat'; 出溜: chūliū means 'slip'; 大老爷儿们儿: dàlǎoyérmenr means 'men, males';

The following samples are some Beijing dialects which have been already accepted as Mandarin in recent years. 二把刀: èrbǎdāo means 'not very skillful'; 哥们儿: gēmenr means 'good male friends'; 抠门儿: kōuménr means 'parsimony'; 打小儿: dǎxiǎo'ér means 'since childhood'

• 你好 nǐ hǎo －hello
• 你好吗？nǐ hǎo ma?－How are you?
• 我 wǒ－me, I
• 你 nǐ －you
• 您 nín －you (Used only when out of respect)

• Chinese language
• Standard Chinese (language)

• General Introduction of Mandarin Language
• Pinyin Annotator Archived 2007-08-11 at the Wayback Machine Automatically adds phonetic symbols (pinyin) on top of Chinese characters.
• I Love Chinese Learning Chinese Magazine
• Free Chinese Character Input Software Archived 2008-05-07 at the Wayback Machine Google Pinyin Input Software
• Learn Mandarin 11 Free Mandarin learning lessons
• Mandarin Pinyin In order to learn standard Chinese, one must learn its phonetic system first.
• Yellow Bridge An online resource for students of the Chinese language
• Zhongwen Red Archived 2022-03-22 at the Wayback Machine Free set of systematic lessons for Mandarin Chinese.
• Mandarin Language -Citizendium