Chinese is a tonal language

The Chinese language is a tonal language.

Chinese sentence structure

Chinese is a subject-verb-object language (SVO).

Sally ate chocolate.

Sally is the subject, ate is the verb, and chocolate is the object.

Mandarin Chinese speakers

Mandarin Chinese has almost 1.3 billion speakers worldwide.

Hanzi

The Chinese characters are called hanzi. They are logograms used in the writing of the Chinese language.

Nouns in Chinese

Nouns in Chinese do not have any grammatical gender.

Mandarin Chinese tones

In Mandarin Chinese, there are four tones. The examples for the Chinese word ma are below.

In the first tone, mā means mother
In the second tone, má means hemp
In the third tone, mǎ means horse
In the fourth tone, mà means scold

When there is no tone mark, it is sometimes referred to as a neutral tone or fifth tone. If there is no tone mark, ma means a question.

Simplified and traditional Chinese characters

Simplified and traditional Chinese characters are two sets of Chinese logographic characters. In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of characters were simplified by the Chinese government. This was done in order to make them easier to learn. The traditional Chinese characters require more strokes to write than the simplified ones. Taiwan and Hong Kong though still use the traditional Chinese characters.

Pinyin

Pinyin is the system for transcribing the sound of Chinese characters into the Latin script alphabet.

Chinese characters

The Chinese language does not have an alphabet. It uses Chinese characters (hanzi) which are logograms. These number in the tens of thousands. Only a few thousand though are necessary for reading.

Chinese language spacing

The Chinese language does not have spaces between words.

Mandarin Chinese native speakers

Mandarin Chinese has almost one billion native speakers.

Official language of China

The official language of China is Standard Chinese. This is also known as Mandarin or Modern Standard Chinese.

Hello in Chinese

Hello in Chinese is nǐ hǎo (nee haoww).

Chinese language in UN

Chinese is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The others are Arabic, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.