- Modern Standard Chinese (speech) is known as Putonghua in mainland China. Modern Standard Chinese is known as Guoyu in Taiwan, and Huayu in Malaysia and Singapore. We refer to the language (written, spoken) as Zhongwen.
2. More about Chinese here: “We generally take Chinese to be synonymous with Mandarin, but Mandarin is one of hundreds of Chinese languages still actively spoken in China. Chances are, that unless a person comes from Beijing, they speak at least one other dialect.”
^ Beijing people technically have their own “dialect” too. So this is not entirely accurate.
3. Chinese is, sometimes, pictographic (forming an image, picture).
4. “Chinese characters are mostly made up of building blocks called radicals, which have 1 to 17 strokes. Radicals and strokes must be written in order: usually left to right and top to bottom.”
5. “The Chinese government simplified Chinese characters shortly after the beginning of the People’s Republic era (1949), reducing strokes per character by an average of around 33%. Traditional characters are still used for ceremonial wording in China, and are still standard in Hong Kong and Taiwan.”
