It's also a language that will have great utility on the world stage alongside Spanish and Arabic, particularly as Asia becomes more and more prominent in the global economy. In my journey to learn what I can from my teachers, there are many interesting facts about Chinese language that I picked up along the way.
Firstly, Standard Mandarin Chinese, known in mainland China as 普通话 Pǔtōnghuà, refers to a spoken form of the Beijing dialect that has been standardized as the common language of use across China. Taiwan also uses Standard Mandarin as the predominantly spoken dialect of Chinese, though there are slight pronunciation differences, similar to different accents in English. Other dialects, or as I prefer to call them, languages, also exist in other parts of China, such as Cantonese in Hong Kong and Hokkien in Taiwan. You can speak Mandarin but not read and write it, because the term only refers to the spoken language.
For reading and writing, there is Simplified Chinese 简体字 Jiǎntǐzì (used in Mainland China) and Traditional Chinese 正體字 Zhèngtǐzì (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau). They both read the same and are used as the writing system for all dialects in the Sinosphere (Chinese-speaking world). The difference between the two is that traditional characters are a version of written Chinese that has existed more or less in the same form since 200 C.E. They have a long history and are a source of pride for Chinese culture, which identifies itself with the writing system. Simplified characters were devised by the People's Republic of China during the twentieth Century when literacy rates were low.
