Learn Chinese

The reasons for learning Chinese, the most spoken language in the world, are abundant.

Because of China's increasing status in the world economy, the demand for people with Chinese language skills has drastically increased. If you Learn Chinese, you will be able to communicate with one in five people globally.

Although English is still the most commonly used language for business communication in Asia, this is slowly but surely changing.

As China is replacing the US as the main trading partner in most East and Southeast Asian countries, Chinese will play an increasingly important role as a language for business communication.

Learning Chinese provides you with excellent opportunities to get a step ahead and draw the attention of future employers.

Chinese Language Demographics

Slightly more than 1 billion people in the world speak some form of the various dialects of the Chinese language. Estimates as of 2005 calculate that they are 873 million native speakers of the language, and 178 million second language speakers. Based on the current population of the world, one out of every five people is Chinese, and this makes it the most widely spoken language in the world. Chinese is spoken as a first language in the People's Republic of China (Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau), Taiwan, Singapore, and other Chinese communities.

Chinese Language Facts

• About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as its native language, making it the language with the most native speakers.
• The Chinese language (spoken in its standard Mandarin dialect) is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations.
• The Chinese language is part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although most Chinese perceive the many dialects of spoken Chinese as a single language, the variations of the spoken language are comparable to those of the different Romance languages.
• The concepts used by Chinese to think about language are different from those in the West, partly because of the unification of the Chinese characters in writing, and partly because of differences in the political and social development of China compared to that of Europe.
• One major difference between Chinese concepts of language and its Western counterparts is that Chinese makes a sharp distinction between written language (wen) and spoken language (yu). This also extends to the distinction between written word (zi) and spoken word (hua). The concept of a unified arrangement of both written and spoken forms of language is much less strong in Chinese than in the West. There are a variety of spoken Chinese dialects, the most recognized of which is Mandarin. However, there is only one uniform written script.
• Spoken Chinese is a tonal language related to Tibetan and Burmese, but genetically unrelated to other neighboring languages, such as Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and Japanese. However, these languages were strongly influenced by Chinese in the course of history, both linguistically and extra linguistically.
• Korean and Japanese both have writing systems which employ Chinese characters. They are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. While North Korea has completely discontinued Hanja and implemented Hangul as the sole way to express their language, South Korea continues to use Hanja as a form of bold face. Aside from Korean and Japanese, Vietnamese also contains many Chinese loanwords and formerly used many Chinese characters.

Visit the page below for information on Chinese Courses in China.

The content of this page is original and is copyright of Languages in Action. It has been researched and adapted from several respected sources of Chinese language information such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language.