Chinese translation

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The most widespread form of Chinese is Mandarin, which may be regarded as modern standard Chinese. It has several dialects and is spoken as a first language by some 835 million people in Central and Northern China, as well as Taiwan, claiming more native speakers than any other language. Mandarin, in its various forms, is spoken by 70% of the population of China. It is the official language of both the Peopleâ€™s Republic of China and Taiwan as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore and is employed as one of the official languages of the United Nations.

One major difference between Chinese concepts of language and Western concepts is that Chinese makes a sharp distinction between written language (wen 文) and spoken language (yu 语). The distinction extends between written word (zi) and spoken word (hua).

The Chinese written language employs the use of characters. Chinese characters take two forms, Simplified and Traditional. Simplified characters were derived from the traditional form with the aim of increasing the level of literacy throughout mainland China. Simplified characters were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizeable proportion of traditional Chinese characters.

In spoken form, Mandarin, like all Chinese dialects, is a tonal language. This means that tones, just like consonants and vowels, are used to distinguish words from each other. Many foreigners have difficulties mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of characters in the language that only differ by tone.

Tone Table:

Tone	Mark	Description
1^st		High and Level
2^nd		Starts medium in tone, then rises to the top.
3^rd		Starts low, dips to the bottom, then rises toward the top.
4^th		Starts at the top, then falls sharp and strong to the bottom
Neutral		Flat, with no emphasis.

(mā mà mă ma?) "Did mother scold the horse?"

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