Chinese

Chinese is spoken by over one billion people. Other than Mandarin Chinese, which has about 850 million native speakers, there are 7 other Chinese languages that have a lot of differences between them.

Chinese is an official language in:

China Taiwan (23 million) Singapur (5 million)

There are Chinese-speaking minorities in a number of other countries too, often living in the famous "China-Towns".

Chinese - Old and New

Other interesting facts about the
Chinese language:

• Chinese characters are the oldest writing system in the world that is still in use today.
• To be able to read a Chinese newspaper, you should know at least 2000 Chinese characters.
• In the past, Chinese was written from top to bottom. Nowadays, writing from left to right is common, just like in the West.
• In total, about one fifth of the world's population has Chinese as their native language.

Learn Chinese

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