Which Chinese to learn?

delanest

Hi

I wish to learn chinese as a second language.

Which type should I learn? How many types are there. I would wish to use the one that has the highest number of people speaking and which would be used comercially.

Which type for example is the legislation written in? sign posts etc?

Finally since there seems to be a large chinese community now living here in Ireland, does anybody know which type the majority of these people speek?

Thanks

hat

Mandarin(Standard spoken Chinese) is the official spoke language in China (Mainland). It has the highest number of people speaking.
Cantonese is used in Hong Kong and some area in the south China.

The legislation is written in Simplified form. As well as sign posts etc.
Traditional form is used in Hong Kong tho.

In Ireland, the majority of Chinese people are from mainland(80%), they speak Mandarin. Most Chinese takeaway or restaurant owners/staff are from Hong Kong, and they speak Cantonese(of course some of them can speak Mandarin as well).

ApeXaviour

There are over 50 chinese dialects, each small area pretty much has it's own language which is the first toungue of it's inhabitants. However in southern china (canton) Cantonese is seen as the "public" language in which most people will communicate. Even in saying this Mandarin is the government official language, it is also the most spoken language in the world (nearly 900,000,000 fluent speakers). Even though most speakers wouldn't have it as their first language it is nevertheless the most widely understood.

davros

As the guys said, Mandarin is the most widely used. It is even sufficient in Cantonese-speaking parts of China (and it's becoming more and more useful in Hong Kong too).

But apart from that, the teaching of Mandarin to foreigners has been standardised, lots of good teaching material is available and you will more easily find teachers and courses in Mandarin than for any other variant of Chinese.

DEmeant0r

Yup, if you're looking to go to China, you should learn Mandarin. If you're looking to go to Hong Kong or Guanhzhou, you should learn Cantonese, although Mandarin is being picked up as a second language in Hong Kong at the moment...

Shing

Also, if you're looking to work in Hong Kong, Mandarin is a requirement for virtually all jobs. Moreso than English.

Regards,
Wai Shing

Hui

Putonghua, or the common language, is standardized Chinese based on Beijing dialect. Many westerners refer it as Mandarin. It is taught from primary school, used for national and international TV and radio broadcasting, and will be better understood by the general public in China or overseas than other dialects, e.g. Cantonese - the dialect of Canton(Guangdong) and Hong Kong.

For the various dialects in existence across the country, however, they share basically the same set of grammatical rules and writing system.

The Chinese language is a very interesting language to learn. At first it's a bit hard to grasp all the tones and match a character with its corresponding pinyin, but once you've learnt 50 to 100 words or so, you can use them like building blocks and have a lot of fun. My Irish student writes three sentences every week after about 40 hours of study.

Hope that's of some help to you.