There are three major languages spoken in China. These are Mandarin, Shanghaiese, and Cantonese. Mandarin has more native speakers than any other language in the world.
Here are the Five good reasons to learn Chinese:
1.China has the biggest population in the world—1.3 billion people.
2.If you speak English and Mandarin you can communicate with over half the world's population.
3.China is becoming an economic superpower.
4.The Chinese language is fascinating.
5.You get much more out of a visit to China if you can speak some Chinese.
Mandarin has many different names in Chinese. Here are some, with their literal translations:
guó yǔ national language
pǔ tōng huà universal words
hàn yǔ language of the Han
zhōng wén Chinese language
Chinese people learn Mandarin too
At the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the incoming Nationalist government decided that Mandarin should become the standard language of China, replacing the many languages and dialects that made communication between people difficult.
It was originally thought that Mandarin would be spoken by everyone by 2030. However, because of the size of China and the number of languages spoken, teachers in many schools still give classes in the local language. Mandarin is studied like a foreign language class, to use for speaking with non-locals.