Language
      

What is usually referred to as Chinese is in fact the language of China's largest ethnic group, the Hans. It is the main language spoken in China and one of the world's major languages, ranking among the official as well as working languages at the United Nations and other international organizations.

The Chinese language is one of the oldest languages in the world, its earliest written records going as far back as more than 3,000 years ago. During this long period of time Chinese has seen constant development, but its grammar, vocabulary and writing system have in the main retained their basic features. What is being taught in the textbook, Practical Chinese Reader, is what is known as "the common speech", the kind of modern Chinese with "the Beijing speech sounds as the standard sounds, the Northern dialect as the basic dialect and modern classic works written in the vernacular as its grammatical models."

What does the language sound like?
   Let's look at the video. An American businessman is on his business trip to China, he is talking with   some Chinese people in Chinese.

What does the language look like?

 The following presents different fonts of the two characters "Hanzi", meaning Chinese character.  Let's have a look at them.

To learn the language, you may want good dictionaries. On Page 110, the textbook introduces the most popular current Chinese dictionaries. If you search online, you will find both Chinese English Dictionary and English-Chinese Dictionary.

Useful websites:

http://www.chinalanguage.com/CCDICT/index.html

http://www.mandarintools.com/worddict.html

http://violet.umf.maine.edu/~mshea/China/diction.html