Best place to learn Chinese in India
Chinese is a group of language varieties that form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.2 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world’s population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. Due to their lack of mutual intelligibility, however, they are classified as separate languages in a family by some linguists, who note that the varieties are as divergent as the Romance languages.
Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, was adopted in the 1930s, is now an official language of both the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China on Taiwan, one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The written form, using the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of unintelligible dialects. Since the 1950s, simplified Chinese characters have been promoted for use by the government of the People’s Republic of China, while traditional characters remain in use in Taiwan, Singapore and other countries with a significant amount of Chinese speaking populations such as Malaysia.
Mandarin is spoken by about 800 million speakers, or 66%, followed by Min 75 million, e.g. Southern Min, Wu 74 million, e.g. Shanghainese, and Yue 68 million, e.g. Cantonese. Mandarin Chinese is the language of government and education of the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, with the notable exceptions of Hong Kong and Macau where a local dialect of Chinese called Cantonese is more often used.





