Basic Chinese Conversation Phrases
With about 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world’s population) speaking a variety of Chinese as their first language, the most common language in China is Standard Chinese. China is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Chinese, is known by several names, simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ or also 中文; Zhōngwén, especially for the written language. Most linguists classify all of the variations of spoken Chinese that form the Sinitic branch as the Sino-Tibetan language family(spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China) and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, similar to Proto Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. While the prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely the result of geography, namely the plains of north China, the presence of Mandarin in Sichuan is largely due to a plague in the 12th century, which may have been related to the Black Death, depopulating the area, leading to later settlement from north China. There are more than 70 million people belonging to 55 different national minorities living in China, and while each minority has its own spoken language, many minority groups do not have any distinguishable written form for their languages. The Chinese language is the oldest written language in the world with at least six thousand years of history.
China is a beautiful country that attracts millions of tourists every year. Apart from that China is also the world’s second-largest economy by nominal GDP and the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is the world’s fastest-growing major economy. Therefore, it also attracts millions of entrepreneurs and investors every single year.
