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我 wǒ I 给 gěi give 你 nǐ you 一本 yìběn a 书 shū book [我給你一本書] 我 给 你 一本 书 wǒ gěi nǐ yìběn shū I give you a book In southern dialects, as well as many southwestern and Lower Yangtze dialects, the objects occur in the reverse order. Most varieties of Chinese use post-verbal particles to indicate aspect, but the particles used vary. Most Mandarin ...
Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese among other varieties, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, and is mostly spoken within Chinese-American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California and New York. [6]
English (excl. creole languages) Indo-European: Germanic: 380 million 1.135 billion 1.515 billion Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese, but excl. other varieties) Sino-Tibetan: Sinitic: 941 million 199 million 1.140 billion Hindi (excl. Urdu) Indo-European: Indo-Aryan: 345 million 264 million 609 million Spanish (excl. creole languages ...
Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is English, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean. [28] According to the Foreign Service Institute, a native English speaker needs over 2,200 hours of intensive study, taking 88 weeks (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. [29]
The bulk of these words were originally coined in Shanghai during the early 20th century and later loaned from there into Mandarin, hence their Mandarin pronunciations occasionally being quite divergent from the English. For example, in Shanghainese 沙发; 沙發 (sofa) and 马达; 馬達 ('motor') sound more like their English counterparts.
Mandarin Chinese is the most popular dialect, and is used as a lingua franca across China. Linguists classify these varieties as the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family . Within this broad classification, there are between seven and fourteen dialect groups, depending on the classification.
English words of Chinese origin usually have different characteristics, depending on precisely how the words encountered the West. Despite the increasingly widespread use of Standard Chinese—based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin—among Chinese people, English words based on Mandarin are comparatively few.
Hokkien remains the most prestigious language other than Mandarin and English in Taiwan. Although Hokkien, Hakka, and Taiwan's many Indigenous languages have now been elevated to the status of national languages, it is notable that there is a clear de facto gradient of valuation of these languages.