About one fifth of the world's population, or more than a billion people speak some form of Chinese. Most of these people consider Chinese as a kind of macrolanguage, and the individual forms of it as dialects. You may have heard of languages like Cantonese, Taiwanese, Min, or Fujianese. "Chinese" is less a language than a diverse group of languages!
If you're a language learner and you're panicking - don't worry. The language you're probably learning is Mandarin. This is the most common form of Chinese and most Chinese people speak it. About 850 million people claim Mandarin as their first language. There are a number of words for the language in Chinese itself - Hanyu (the language of Han people), Zhongwen (Chinese language), and Putonghua (the common speech) are some of the more typical ways to refer to it. No matter how you say it, it's the best way to bridge the gap between the diverse groups of Chinese people.
Chinese forms one half of the Sino-Tibetan language family. One of the reasons we refer to Chinese as a macrolanguage has to do with written Chinese. You may have noticed that written Chinese and Japanese look remarkably similar. This is because they have a writing system in common. What Chinese people call Hanzi, and Japanese people call Kanji are the same - Characters that represent words or ideas. In fact, Chinese people are often able to read Japanese newspapers and vice versa, even though they can't talk to one another!
Because many diverse groups of people are able to read the same form of written language, they have something in common that allows them to see their individual forms of language as the same, although in fact their languages are quite different.
Chinese is an isolating language. This means that in contrast to English which is full of prefixes and suffixes, it breaks down language into small, simple words. In the past, people have called Chinese a "monosyllabic" language - in other words, a language in which each word has only one syllable. This is wrong. Modern Mandarin Chinese actually strives to make words disyllabic, or with two syllables. For example, it adds the suffix "zi" to the end of words. The word for cup is "beizi", and not "bei". The word for chopsticks is "kuaizi" and not "kuai". The "zi" doesn't really mean anything, but Chinese speakers like the sound of words with two syllables.
Chinese is also a tonal language, like many other Asian languages like Thai or Vietnamese. It has four separate tones which change the meaning of a word. This can be really intimidating for English speakers because English has no tones (except a rising tone to indicate a question), and English speech varies a lot in tone to indicate emphasis and expression. Chinese sounds a bit robotic to English speakers at first because it is full of tones. However, tones come quite naturally by listening and emulating Chinese speech. It's necessary to listen and copy anyway, because Chinese contains different sounds that need to be practiced.
So what does this mean to you, as an English speaker? Chinese is not just a different set of verbs and nouns, or a different way of writing. As a language, it is deeply tied into a number of different cultures and geographic areas, and has an interesting and unique sense of the way language should shape ideas. The sounds that Chinese makes, the way it is written, and the way people use it to express themselves, show the fascinating ways it differs from English. In order to become fluent in Chinese, you must be willing to learn a whole new way of thinking.
Justin White lives in Jhubei Taiwan, and frantically works at learning Chinese.
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