Mandarin is the official spoken language of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.  The word “Mandarin” is actually derived from the Chinese word “Man Da Ren” (a Manchurian official).  It is based on the dialect of Beijing.  Cantonese is spoken by people of Guangdong province, Hong Kong, Macau, and many overseas Chinese who are descendents of people from these places.  Since the first Chinese settlers in America were Cantonese speakers, many of the well known words such as “dim sum”, “lo mein”, etc. all came from Cantonese.  In addition there is also “Written Cantonese” which consist of many localized Chinese characters to phonetically simulate spoken Cantonese.  It can be seen in the subtitles of Hong Kong movies.  However the “Written Cantonese” is not considered an official written language.                     

The simple answer to this question is that the simplified characters are traditional characters with reduced number of strokes.  It was implemented by the government of People’s Republic of China in the 1950’s as a way to simplify the learning of the characters to help reduce illiteracy.  Outside of mainland China, the simplified characters are also adopted in Singapore.  The traditional characters are still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and by overseas Chinese.  With the rise of PRC as a major economic power, the simplified characters are gaining more international acceptance.  It is worth noting that the conversion between simplified and traditional characters is not as simple as a mouse click.  Just like the differences between UK/US English and Portugal/Brazilian Portuguese, there are different vocabulary and grammar usage between the Mainland Mandarin and Taiwanese Mandarin.  Everyday words such as “tomato” and “bicycle” are called different things in mainland China and Taiwan.  Although these are the exceptions and not the rules, when translating into Chinese, one needs to be aware whom the target readers are.

There is no alphabet for the Chinese language.  Most of the Chinese characters are made up of “building blocks” called radicals.  A radical often gives a meaning to the character.  The radicals are also used to look up a Chinese character in a dictionary when you do not know its pronunciation.  There is, however, the romanization of Chinese characters called pinyin.  For more information on pinyin, please see the entry #7.   

Different ways to construct Chinese characters are

• Phono-Semantic (one part of the character gives the meaning, another part gives the sound, the most widely used character formation method)
• Ideogrammic Compounds (logical aggregates)
• Pictograms (a pictorial image of the character)
• Ideograms (simple indicative)

The most exhaustive Chinese dictionaries contain anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 characters.  Fortunately, one only needs to know about 2,000 characters to read most of the newspaper articles and books.  An educated person who masters 3,000 – 5,000 characters can function properly in daily life and work.

There are no common Chinese names like John, Paul, Mary, etc. as in English.  The Chinese parents pick seemingly random characters to name their children, provided it sounds good in combination with the family name.  A boy’s name may imply strength or intelligence.  A girl’s name may reflect beauty or elegance.  Also, it is common for children to have a kid name, or a nickname that is used primarily by his/her family members.  In the old days prior to the one child policy, it was common for parents to refer to their children by their birth order, such as “Lao Da” (Old No. 1) or “Xiao San” (Little No. 3).  During the late 40’s and early 50’s, many parents named their children with characters meaning of “developing a new nation”, coinciding with the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.  During the 60’s and 70’s, many of the children have names with the meanings of “Revolution”, “Defending the East”, etc. in accordance with the extreme leftwing ideology during the Cultural Revolution.  Nowadays it is not uncommon for children to have Western sounding names, which is a reflection of China’s open door policy.

Pinyin is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese characters.  It started in Mainland China in the 1950’s and has gradually become the international standard for Chinese character romanization.  Students of Chinese language use pinyin to learn the pronunciation of Chinese characters.  It is also used as a tool to input Chinese characters into word processing software using a standard English language keyboard.  Another widely used Chinese romanization system is Wade-Giles system, which is still used in Taiwan.  An example that illustrates the difference between those two systems is that the famous beer brand “Tsingtao”, which is in Wade-Giles romanization, the pinyin romanization of the brand would be “Qingdao”.  Also, since the first Chinese settlers in America were mainly from the province of Guangdong, they speak Cantonese which is different from Mandarin.  Many of the well known translations of Chinese places, such as Peking, Canton, Hong Kong, etc. are phonetically translated from Cantonese.  The standard pinyin romanizations of these places are, respectively, Beijing, Guangdong, and Xiang Gang.