How Many Languages Are There in China?

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🇨🇳 IS CHINESE A LANGUAGE? The short answer? No. Chinese is a language FAMILY, not a single language. In this video, you will learn the fascinating story of 7 major Chinese languages, and a bit about the many non-Chinese languages that are spoken in China.
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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Is “Chinese” a Language?
0:20 - One Country, Many Languages
1:35 - History, In a Nutshell
3:11 - #1: Min
4:41 - #2: Gan
5:30 - #3: Hakka
6:58 - #4: Mandarin
8:24 - #5: Cantonese
10:18 - #6: Wu
11:10 - #7: Xiang
11:48 - Endangered Languages
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
BBC: Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin
www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-c...
🎬 Video Clips:
Words in Four Different Chinese Dialects
• Words in Four Differen...
Listen To These 25 Different Chinese Dialects
• Listen To These 25 Dif...
12 Words in Different Chinese Dialects & Languages
• 12 Words in Different ...
Mandarin VS Cantonese VS Hakka
• Mandarin VS Cantonese ...
My Mother-In-Law from China Teaches Me Putian, Fujian Dialect
• My Mother-In-Law from ...
The Hokkien language, casually spoken | Selly speaking Median Hokkien | Wikitongues
• The Hokkien language, ...
Classic Cantonese Opera hits the stage again in China
• Classic Cantonese Oper...
🖼 Images:
“Fujian in China.svg” by TUBS is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
“Locator map of the ROC Taiwan.svg” by JOSH tw is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
“Jiangxi in China.svg” by TUBS is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
“Yangtze river map.png” by Shannon1 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
“Hakka in China.png” by ASDFGHJ is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
“5 historical hakka migrations.svg” by Sdcheung is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
“Hekeng - view from the lookout - DSCF3048.JPG” by Vmenkov is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hu...
“Mandarin and Jin in China.png” by Kanguole is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
“China edcp location map.svg” by Uwe Dedering CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
“Hong Kong in China.svg” by TUBS is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
“Guangxi in China.svg” by TUBS is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi...
“Latitude zones.png” by Maulucioni is licensed under CC BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...

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23 май 2024

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Комментарии : 1,7 тыс.

@storylearning Год назад

🇨🇳 Watch my deep dive into the fiery story of Chinese 👉🏼 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2fwWZdjL2lU.html

@klutzysalami Год назад

One correction: you mentioned the "altaic languages". I just wanted to let you know that this proposed language family has widely been disproved, and the vast majority of linguists do not consider them as genetically related languages anymore. Other than that, cool video

@GL-iv4rw Год назад

Han Chinese is a fake ethnicity. In reality the Chinese race ended long ago when the Mongols swept all of China and throughout Asia during the Yuan Dynasty. It's like saying Germans and Italians are the same people. What we call as "Han Chinese" is nothing but a nefarious lie concocted by the machinations of the evil CCP. There's no such thing as "Chinese" as the race doesn't exist anymore.

@LoC28C Год назад

The Yue language a;sp cover the language spoken in Vietnam too. If you listen carefully, Vietnamese sound very Cantonese.

@obito-uchiha_ Год назад

Turkish, mongolic, thai, indonesia, burma, Japan Korea china are same language family which got differentiate due to country, n these language can get unrecognizable within 5 to 10 generation, due to tonal n variety. I can't understand my cousin language though we speak same language in different tone, he use tune n we don't.

@sunmanyi3265 Год назад

99% of English words were copied from other languages, can you find one word that is originally an English word? Perhaps the word dog?

@sl0523 Год назад

I'm Chinese and this is how I view Chinese as a language. Chinese is a written language, not a spoken language, as each region, even village, in China, has its own dialect. The reason for that is Chinese is not a alphabetical or phonetical language. Take English as an example. Many people argue that English is not a phonetical language, because its spelling doesn't necessarily reflect its pronunciation. However, because English uses Latin alphabet, each alphabet still provide guidance to the pronunciation to some degree. The problem with Chinese characters is that there's not so much connection between each character and its pronunciation, hence, thereotically speaking, each region can pronounce the characters however way they want.

@GL-iv4rw Год назад

@user-wg4fq8wb8x Год назад

@@diydylana3151 It has certain combinations to form vocabulary, but even one Chinese character has meaning, so, which people could have their own combination to make people understand, possibly freestyle?

@user-rc8kd9vn1q Год назад

@@diydylana3151 "Have you eaten yet?" Mandarin: 吃飯了沒 (eat-rice-"en" yet?) Canto: 食咗飯未 (eat-en rice yet?) Wu: 飯吃過伐 (rice eat-en yet?) Mandarin prefers to combine the verb and noun as a verb-noun combination (吃飯, eat-rice) and puts the present-perfect marker (了, ed/en) after it. So, "吃飯了" (eat-rice "ed"). Canto prefers the use of word surffixes, like putting the surffixes next to the verb (食咗, eat-en), then putting the object (飯, rice) after it. As a whole, "食咗飯" (eat-en rice). Wu prefers Subject-Object-Verb (except the one in Shanghai, which is heavily influenced by Mandarin). So it makes use of pharses like "飯吃過" (rice eat-en).

@user-rc8kd9vn1q Год назад

@@diydylana3151 They can have different nouns, verbs, or even pronouns for the same meaning. They/them: (Mandarin) 他們 ta men (Canto) 佢哋 kui dei (Wu) 渠拉 hi la There: (Mandarin) 那裡 na li (Canto) 嗰道 go toh (Wu) 埃搭 i taq Home/house: (M) 家 jia (C) 屋企 okei (W) 屋裡向 on li sia Dollars: (M) 元 yuan (C) 文 mun (W) 鈿 ti To love: (M) 愛 ai (C) 冧 lum (W) 愛幕 emo

@user-rc8kd9vn1q Год назад

@@diydylana3151 yeah... it's kinda an excuse, but people still use it. Just like how the same group of people didn't treat other western languages as one just becuz they're written in the Latin alphabet. That's why starting from the 20th century, the Japanese chose to develop their own katakana and hiragana systems to mix with kanji. Korea has banned schools from teaching Chinese characters and adopted the Korean alphabet created on their own. Vietnam even opted to use the Latin alphabet after all. This shows that the ex-Sinosphere countries more or less tried to reduce the impacts from China regime by reducing the use of Chinese characters.

@wuhuhu1390 Год назад

China was unified in 221 BC under Qin dynasty (famous for Terracotta army). That was when Chinese script was standardized. But because Chinese script is non-phonetic, doesn't guide pronunciation, spoken form vary regionally despite all sharing the same script.

@doristan-215 Год назад

Love this!!!! I speak Hokkien as I was born and raised in the Philippines. I’m so glad you really broke down the different languages. Great work!

@fannyalbi9040 Год назад

do pinoy chinese descendants still maintain their dialects?

@sh0c7 Год назад

@@fannyalbi9040 Depends on the family. The conservative ones maintain it, while the liberal ones either maintains it or abandons it.

@billythekid5967 Год назад

@@fannyalbi9040 yes they do, so is malaysia thailand and singapore.

@elootl Год назад

Hokkien is on great decline in Malaysia now and being replaced with Mandarin. Only in Medan, Indonesia that still have young people speaking Hokkien.

@anneke6904 Год назад

@@elootl not only in Medan.

@Bob_just_Bob Год назад

As a foreigner who’s been living in China for almost 25 years now I wouldn’t want to even guess at how many dialects there are. I myself am accustomed to using two of them Mandarin mostly as spoken in Beijing but also as used in the Northeast as well as Cantonese but I travel in country a lot and am quite used to hearing a number of the others. Great video thanks

@kevinw9806 Год назад

well, no one knows how many dialects are there. in my hometown, city of 3M people, we can tell which town you are from by dialects. 🤣

@user-yv6ji3ex5f Год назад

会普通话就足够到中国任何地方了。

@hastingz9948 Год назад

@@user-yv6ji3ex5f yeah,if you venture in big cities only.

@wzg7998 Год назад

@@user-yv6ji3ex5f If you can speak in Mandarin you Are able to communicate with the people in anywhere in China

@Steve_305 Год назад

Lucky I'm stuck in America 😔

@maxyi2672 Год назад

One should think of China as the Roman Empire. The Chinese written language is like written Latin but pronounced the French way, the Italian way, the Spanish way etc. Imaging Latin being the only official language, while French, Italian, Spanish and etc are considered dialects. That is the Chinese language.

@kion24 Год назад

Totally correct

@EddyWoon Год назад

Thanks for this great episode. My mum is from the Putian region of Fuzhou and speaks the Xinghua language. I had only heard this language when my mum was speaking with my late grandparents. About 20+ years ago I had stepped into a sushi restaurant and heard the staff there speaking this language. I immediately spoke an expression similar to "wow" in that language and they surprised to have a random customer being able to understand and speak that language. They were the only people outside of my family that I had spoken this language with. I am Hakka and there is no one that I know of in my region that speaks it. The last time that I had spoken this was about 40 years ago. I am now looking this up in RU-vid to relearn this language from again.

@vernlee0511 Год назад

Wow, fuzhou

@Zakaius Год назад

Nge hay Hakka ngin meh?

@vernlee0511 Год назад

@@Zakaius I thinks so. My grandparents speak hakka eventough they weren't hakka ngin

@zealandia5668 Год назад

China is basically a combined Europe. Some Chinese dialects are close to each other and people who speak them can pretty much understand each other (similar like people speaking Danish and Norwegian), some are more different (similar like Danish vs Dutch), some are even more different, which people cannot understand each other (similar like Danish vs Bulgarian).

@JeusAlprime108 Год назад

Actually Thanks to Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor that unified the entire china and start Qin Dynasty from 221 BC, who decided to unify all writing system by burned all other book written in other way inherit in other ex-rulers territories. But unfortunately his dynasty overthrown shortly after the Qin Shi Huang passed away, and another Han Dynasty which support by all previous rulers descendant took over and begun to discredit all effort Qin Shi Huang done to make China a unified nation than whatever Europe remained to be until nowadays.

@user-rc8kd9vn1q Год назад

@@JeusAlprime108 Don't forget Qin burned all the books written in other languages and characters to fulfill his unification ambition. Just like, if the British and Americans from now on burned all books written in your mother language and forced you and your generations to use English only for a few ten years, would you still thank him?

@JeusAlprime108 Год назад

@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Burning book doesn't work in modern era anymore, because internet never forget, and before they can do that, they need to conquer entire Earth and defeat all other countries with different language. Now even if U.S+U.K+Aus unable to do that, so you are discussing an unrealistic scenario.

@user-rc8kd9vn1q Год назад

@@JeusAlprime108 I'm not asking if the Internet forgets or not, but if you're okay with this and thank the US and UK unite the world.

@JeusAlprime108 Год назад

@@user-rc8kd9vn1q I don't think you understand context correctly when you put out such absurd scenario of U.S/U.K conquer the world and wipe out all non-english civilisation. Qin and all rulers back are branch from same civilisation, even tho their languange and wording system are not exactly the same, but the difference ain't as big as how for e.g English and French language nowaday. Chinese word characters are logogram which is similar to drawing, and different region of people who share the same logogram character tend to draw differently as time progress. That's why back then during Zhou Dynasty Early Spring and Autumn period, their wording system difference aren't as big as how Europe has develop into nowadays. So if from back then, in Qin scenario, of course I wouldn't mind since back then the literacy rate is not even reach 10% population, If I'm one of them, I wouldn't even care to bother too. But now you suggesting U.K/U.S conquer the world and eliminated all other non-english civilisation, that's is a totally none apple to apple scenario. Of course, I couldn't agree to how you put it this way, since you doesn't seem to comprehend the context of both scenario correctly.

@LucasFerreira-dv6ol Год назад

Woww that was a lot of new information! Thank you Olly, I appreciate all the efforts in doing this video! My mind is blowing lol

@Cheryl.C Год назад

I speak Hakka, Cantonese, Mandarin and understand a little Hokkien... greetings from Malaysia 🇲🇾

@aivlisa2344 Месяц назад

Impressive! 👏👏👏

@user-sj8od6bw8w Год назад

As a Chinese, i am here listening to a foreign guy explaining Chinese to me, nice.

@burningunicorn6174 Год назад

That was extremely intresting, thank you for making a video on the topic, very informative

@sudarsanp1503 Год назад

Such a good video ! Thank you so much 👍👍

@RhapsodyinLingo Год назад

Oh no, did you just say the dangerous word "Altaic" 😂 But great and comprehensive coverage of the family!

@thenaturalyogi5934 Год назад

Yaaay finally tackling 2 other languages that I speak. Mandarin and Hokkien. It's actually hard to learn Hokkien if your family doesn't speak it. I learned Hokkien purely from speaking with my parents and elders, I hope this ancient language doesn't die. Edit: so many comments on whether Mandarin or Hokkien or Cantonese are languages. However you want to call it, (language/dialect/pattern of speech people in Fujian speak etc) what it means to me is simply if two people are placed in the same room one person who only speaks and understands Mandarin, the other person who only speaks and understands Hokkien, they would both just stare at each other and not understand each other because they are not mutually intelligible. Unlike Russian and Ukrainian, or Spanish and Portuguese where you have similar words and sounds and these 4 are even considered 4 separate languages.

@storylearning Год назад

Spoken dialects are often like this. Glad you’re keeping it alive

@22joshbb Год назад

Filipino Chinese American here, I want to learn hokkien so bad but in America the only real way to learn is with an online tutor, it’s such a beautiful language

@tweetalig Год назад

I have a friend who speaks Yuet-Ping...a Cantonese sounding dialect. It's her family language.

@nsevv Год назад

Hokkien is spoken alot in countries like Taiwan and Singapore.

@ponta1162 Год назад

I'm a native Cantonese speaker who is learning Hokkien. I found Hokkien is very interesting to learn because as if I'm learning Japanese or Korean, although the grammar is almost same as Chinese languages.

@williamwilliam 9 месяцев назад

Olly, very educational and informative. Thank you.

@wiii2316 Год назад

thanking you for making this - very informative

@arthaschen4701 Год назад

Mandarin was actually chosen as the official language way before 1955. That is why Taiwanese official language is also basically mandarin, or “National Tone”.

@j.8717 Год назад

Yeah, I remember reading it was either Putonghua or Cantonese to be made the "lingua franca". And I'd imagine a final decision made possibly by most board members whose first language was neither the Mandarin or Cantonese, in Nanjing....(?)

@arthaschen4701 Год назад

@@j.8717 Yeah… but the thing is Mandarin is adapted from Beijing dialect. Being the capital of Qing, I imagine people had to learn Beijing dialect for capital affairs. The reason Cantonese was also brought up was because Chang’ ROC was founded in Guangdong 20 years prior to the Lingua Franca vote. Cantonese is the most Spoken dialect in Guangdong and HongKong

@ghostland8646 Год назад

@@arthaschen4701 Cantonese is the most spoken in some part of Indonesia and Vietnam

@AllenYangZzz Год назад

@@arthaschen4701 However even Chiang himself couldn't speak Cantonese. I can't come up with any reason that Cantonese might be chosen as the official language.

@zerocalvin Год назад

@@arthaschen4701 cantonese is also widely spoken in south east asia... places like singapore, malaysia and indonesia for example commonly uses cantonese by the native chinese in those area.

@jckbquck Год назад

Olly, good job! There's so much to unpack here! I'll just touch on a few points included in this video (and skip the ones not mentioned in this video). 1. Geographic China is the size of western Europe plus. So if Europe has so many languages, it would be natural to assume that there are as many languages inside geographic China. (In fact, during several periods in Europe, there was a single official language required to be spoken / written for official business. In geographic China, Mandarin has been that since 1644, the start of the Qing Dynasty, and has survived as such.) 2. Since Chinese writing is basically a drawing, to say that "Chinese" is one language, because the speakers of different dialects share a single writing system, is a bit faulty. Imagine if Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan all use drawings instead of phonetic letters as written language. Then instead of perro, cane, cachorro, and gos, there would just be a single drawing of a dog. Could we then say that Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan are different dialects of the same language, because they use the same drawing?? 2. Min is the most ancient among all languages in China mainly due to the topography of the region in which it has been spoken. The mountainous southeastern portion of geographic China kept Min speakers well isolated from the rest of geographic China. After Middle Chinese moved into southeastern China, it evolved separated there into modern Min. 3. "Mandarin" is not a Mandarin word, nor is it any other Chinese language word. It is a Malay word meaning "official". It was used to describe the language used by officials of the Qing Dynasty (headquartered in Beijing) doing business in the South China sea, different from the typical Cantonese spoken by southern Chinese. The reason why your map of Mandarin-speaking region is so vast has to do with the speed at which the Qing officials was able to spread it within geographic China. (Qing is the last dynasty of China, during a much more modern time, with more advanced transportation.) As these Qing officials spread Mandarin, it picked up local influence. The Mandarin that is the official language of the People's Republic of China today is a unified version of the original northern dialect. 4. Historically, the Great Wall acted as a hard barrier, creating a "cul-du-sac" in terms of the migration of Chinese languages within the boundaries of geographic China. Albeit, tradespeople from the north took their languages through the gates along the Great Wall for centuries, thereby influencing the northern Chinese dialect (ie Mandarin), Mandarin is sort of an "extremity" when it comes to Chinese language evolution in geographic China.

@ChasMusic Год назад

I studied Cantonese because I'm in San Francisco and that's the main Chinese language, although Mandarin has established a much stronger presence in recent years. Even though Cantonese has 9 tones, I consider it easier than Mandarin. This is because it has consonant stop endings, which reduce the meaning pile-up of homonyms.

@HongdongTheNoob Год назад

In Chinese there is a distinction between oral form (语) and written form (文) for the language. The national language subject being taught in schools is exactly named 语文 (in the mainland). The 语 part is basically Mandarin while the 文 part includes both classical literacy and modern writings.

@shinosukenohara2058 Год назад

In India , They have 22 official language and we have 18k+ spoken language (approximate) ,

@Pointillax Год назад

Dialects are really something to be protected, they contribute so much to a rich cultural history. We had many in France, but in order to standardize french, the government actively repressed the transmission of regional languages. My great grandmother talked about being beaten and punished if the teacher heard her speak her regional language. Nowadays only the most culturaly proud regions have managed to keep they language afloat, even though almost no one speaks them. But you'll find roadsigns in both french and regional language if you go to Brittany, or Pays Basque, and some in Alsace. You'll still find some very old farmers far back in the country speaking only in their native regional dialect, and that's quite cool (+ they understand standard french no problem)

@tcbbdddd 7 месяцев назад

It has already happened. Some dialects are fading and the young generations tend to not speak their own dialects. The pronunciation among teenagers is often influenced by mandarin, and strictly speaking, is incorrect. That's why we have the 语保 project (language resource protection project), which records speeches from old native speakers of dialects to preserve those languages. This project also aims to preserve non-chinese languages in china, such as the mongolian dialects (the official language of mongolia is just Khalkh dialect, and we have many other dialects in inner mongolia) and tibetan dialects (traditionally three main dialects are recognized but it turns out there are mutually unintelligible sub-dialects within each "dialect", and even languages that are not tibetan such as Gyalrong were seen as tibetan dialects traditionally).

@tedc9682 Год назад

Excellent video!! So much information!! I can confirm most of what Olly says (though he knows more than me).

@chiewnyemurmann6731 Год назад

Just wonder, how long it took you to research this subject. My goodness, what an excellent video👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻!. Thank you👍🏻😁.

@tweetalig Год назад

As a person who has spoken Mandarin and Cantonese for nearly 40 years, this was highly educational!

@xue7700 Год назад

Cantonese is traditional Chinese, Mandarin was invented in the year 1949. Cantonese use traditional Chinese writing system while Mandarin use simplified writing system.

@adrianso7435 Год назад

The Chinese languages or dialects (the Sinitic languages) are comparable to the modern Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, German, English) or the contemporary Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian). The Chinese languages share the same origin & are members of the same language family.

@Col3Jaeger Год назад

Chinese itself is a written language but a varieties of spoken languages.

@axgalicyoungdude8528 Год назад

I work as a geological investigator for the National Geological Service, and my team regularly goes on field trips to remote areas. We always have one or two local government translators on our team, because we as outsiders simply can't understand some of the local languages.

@JRWB78 Год назад

What a huge surprise to see Olly again! We worked together around ten years ago at the British Council. I clicked on this video because it was recommended by RU-vid and was amazed to see Olly was the presenter! I've never seen this channel before. Anyway, having lived in Beijing for four years and then moved to Hangzhou, understanding Hangzhou Mandarin is virtually impossible because they don't distinguish between the z/zh, c/ch and s/sh sounds. So 四 and 是 have the same pronunciation. 茶 is pronounced ca2. 支持 is pronounced zi1 ci2. It's very strange and extremely challenging, because in English, we associate different accents with different vowel sounds (like the difference between British English "hot" and American English "hot", or the way Australians pronounce "life"), but the different varieties in Mandarin have different consonants. I teach economics at an international school, where I sit between a Hangzhou local (mathematics teacher) and someone from Nanjing who speaks completely standard Mandarin (she's a Chinese teacher). When they have a conversation, I can understand most things she says but almost nothing he says, even though they understand each other 100%.

@hclau362 Год назад

If you are Chinese, then you would have developed a "flexible ear" and be able to understand 99% of various "Local accent", in Mandarin, as we put it. Though you will need a bit more flexibility to understand distinct dialects. 😀

@deepone5005 Год назад

There you are. Like in America where there are many accents - it takes a while for us Asians to get used to their accents - although all of them use the English Language. Chinese is harder unless one is immersed in their daily lives.

@deepone5005 Год назад

Thus it is a challenge for native English speaker to get it right. I have observed that many caucasians- no matter how well versed in the Chinese Language or have been in China for decades, immersed in Chinese living - that they still cannot get some words right in intonation. One is Amoybill , he is very good, can even speak better Chinese than me in Singapore, but I still cant help noticing him going off key on some words. I dont speak Mandarin, just a mixed bag of all languages and dialects here ( Singlish) - but i can quickly spot his off-key words without fail easily.

@ng6148 Год назад

Chinese people understand each other by catching tones. Not pronunciation, specially people from Southern don't care z/zh, c/ch, s/sh.... But they never say the words with wrong tones. Foreigners pay too much attention on Pinyin not tones. Some of them even skip tones.

@deepone5005 Год назад

@@ng6148 Spot on!

@dalubwikaan161 Год назад

I learn a lot outside common linguistics. Thank you

@wilsonedwards8139 Год назад

Fascinating! GTK thanks.

@LL-rn8rn Год назад

Very very good video and more accurate than the officially "educational" one !

@martinji3280 Год назад

Luanping was only one of the many cities chosen to collect audio samples for this newly constructed language called "Putong hua," but most people in that town don't speak perfect mandarin. The city nowadays say they are the place where mandarin was created for tourism and city images reasons, but what they claimed isn't true. All Chinese languages inherit old expressions from middle Chinese and old Chinese, so there is no Chinese language that is "older."

@vivredanslaverite8799 Год назад

In canton ( Guangdong ) province alone , there are at least 3 languages are spoken: Cantonese, Hakka and Teochew .

@hinsonhau9129 Год назад

Love ur content. Subscribed

@IKNFLY666 Год назад

Imagine Europe as a single country, and I ask you, do you speak European? Disregard French, Spanish, Italian, German as merely some form of European dialect. That's basically China.

@tabularasa_br Год назад

Just woke up. Had lunch. A new video by Olly on Chinese languages = oh boy, this is going to be awesome!

@storylearning Год назад

Hope you like it!

@tabularasa_br Год назад

@@storylearning I loved it :)

@matpk Год назад

@@storylearning Chi Na 🎉

@yanghao3389 Год назад

A very great video. I am a Hakka born and grow up in Indonesia, my ancestral hometown is Huizhou in Guangdong province. I speak Hakka and Mandarin

@liongkienfai104 Год назад

Huizhou mana ko?

@yanghao3389 Год назад

@@liongkienfai104 淡水

@mr559 Год назад

The Hmong that we speak in the US, Australia, France, etc. are from the Hmong diaspora that were refugees from the Vietnam War, predominately from Laos and Thailand. War and migration plays an interesting evolution to how a language changes as we adapt and loan words from the people we live with. I can understand the Hmong that is spoken in Southeast Asia (2 dialects, White Hmong and Green Hmong.) As we trace our old migration path up closer to the Vietnam/China border the accent and dialect slightly changes, but I can still understand it. Move up north to the province of Yunnan and other southern provinces of China and it almost feels like a new language. Being able to only pick up a few words.

@zhangeric2302 Год назад

A prevailing thought about the province I was born in, Jiangxi (江西), is it has the most complex dialect system. There is a saying that notes this phenomenon: "A different dialect every 5 kilometers" (十里不同音). Due to the lack of necessity of speaking my hometown dialect, I am not able to speak my hometown dialect but can understand what elders are saying. Note that my hometown is Jingdezhen (景德镇), and the dialect spoken is yingyi (鹰弋片).

@user-lo8cx3rj2z Год назад

Shangrao yanshan

@youtubedeletedmyaccountlma2263 10 месяцев назад

yingyi itself is a language of gan. I analyzed all those 片 just to find out, if you hold a intermediate conversation with someone from nanchang, both of you can't understand each other. same goes for other Gan 片

@anna-marialiu9467 Год назад

The modern Chinese words/characters are a repository of all local dialects. Each town/township/district/… has their own dialect. If you cannot see your neighbour village(s), then they might speak different dialects, especially when they are divided by a mountain or a river. You do the math counting the number of villages in China, then that is roughly the amount of Chines languages/dialects. Each dialect usually possesses from couple hundred words to couple thousand words depending on their life experiences.

@YJSP893 Год назад

Southern Min people here, glad to see you mentioned our language(however i can barely understand the min language in video, we have different accents... so many.

@leoh6596 Год назад

This video is wonderful 👍

@microcolonel Год назад

The imposition of Mandarin was extremely harsh, it was one of the most unusual languages in China at the time.

@tongtong168 Год назад

I always tell my students that I am ethnically Chinese, and I speak Cantonese as my first language being from HK. Just like you ask an Indian, you dont say they speak Indian as India has so many different languages with Hindi is the main one with other languages like Tamil, Urdu Pashtun etc.

@damistudi5923 Год назад

Qi xin . Lei Yao beng.

@shanglaithotsem5771 Год назад

Iam from northeast india butidont know hindi😄😄

@zoeliu1350 Год назад

It's really a high quilty reference and documents to teach my kids know more my mother country.

@UnnTHPS Год назад

6:14 oh my god that was so beautiful i almost cried, I'm Polish so like no way i can understand literally anything, but for some reason this singing really touched me lol

@riverIl0719 Год назад

11:14 “Did you know that China has one tropical zone?” I think you mean Hainan (海南), but you went on talking about Hunan (湖南). One could say part of Guangdong (广东), Guangxi (广西), and Yunnan (云南, famous for Xishuangbanna) is in the tropical zone, but definitely not Hunan (湖南). ❤️

@ghostland8646 Год назад

海南 is ‘hoi nam’ and not hainan

@AllenYangZzz Год назад

@@ghostland8646 just depends on spelled in Cantonese or Mandarin

@ghostland8646 Год назад

@@AllenYangZzz canto

@alexanderfretheim5720 Год назад

"Is Chinese a language?" The answer to that question is weird. Chinese languages are written using a meaning-based writing system, rather than a sound-based writing system. This is a kind of writing system that was much more common in the ancient world than now, with hieroglyphics and the Mayan and Aztec scripts also being examples, but in China it has persisted, in part because when you use a meaning-based writing system, it is possible for two people who speak different languages but use the same meaning-based writing system to communicate with each other in writing, which in a land as linguistically diverse and topographically rugged as China is exceedingly useful. With such systems, it could be said that the written language and the spoken language are actually completely separate, in part because it is possible for two people to share one and not the other, and in part because the sound of the language does not effect the writing, and so Chinese is a written language, but not a spoken language.

@12388696 Год назад

Chinese the most intelligent language ever invented by human beings. If Chinese doesn't use characters and alphabet instead, the dialects will become different languages and much more complex the all of the European languages together.

@lajuntahighschool Год назад

Linguistic diversity in China is so interesting, but so under-recognized. Wu is almost unknown outside of China, in spite of the fact that it has >$80m native speakers. That’s even more than French! And it’s not as if it’s a language spoken in some backwater area, it’s the native language in Shanghai, one of the world’s largest and most economically important cities.

@sofitocyn100 Год назад

french is spoken by far more people than 80 million

@lajuntahighschool Год назад

@@sofitocyn100 total speakers, yes, but native speakers (L1) is about 80 million

@RhapsodyinLingo Год назад

Except its speakers are also ageing :( and it's not as widely used in diverse contexts as french is...

@youtubedeletedmyaccountlma2263 10 месяцев назад

Cause Wu itself has shit tons of languages, Shanghainese can't have a conversation with Hangzhounese. Wu itself is not just one language, is like 5 languages. He also made a mistake, he should have at least try to analyze the phonology of Gan. Gan has 9 languages, not 9 dialects XD

@liongkienfai104 Год назад

I’m from Indonesia, but I don’t speak Hokkien. 😅 I speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Teochew. Teochew and Hokkien are both under the Minnan language family, so I can make out some Hokkien, but communicating is difficult so we often resort to another common language (Mandarin, Indonesian, English). I cannot understand all Yue languages either. I’ve spoken to some folk from Jiangmen city and Yulin city, and cannot understand their language, so we also have to resort to another common tongue. I think Hakka is the one where I can understand various dialects more easily, because I was exposed to various Hakka dialects growing up. But even then it’s only limited to those from Guangdong. I can’t understand the Hakka from Fujian and Jiangxi.

@user-pc5yy7df7c Год назад

东南亚华人普遍会讲很多中国语言

@supernova7966 Год назад

You don't speak Indonesian and Arabic?

@liongkienfai104 Год назад

@@supernova7966 I speak Indonesian, but not Arabic. I think the number of Arabic speakers in Indonesia is even lower than Sinitic language speakers. Most Muslims here can recite prayers and passages from the Quran, but this isn't the same as speaking Arabic. Only those who studied or worked in the Middle East can speak Arabic. Even among the Arab Indonesians I know, they speak a form of Indonesian/Malay with a lot of Arab vocabulary. For example saying "anta" instead of "kamu" for "you." But at the end of the day, it's still not Arabic.

@Rosie-et5fg Год назад

@@supernova7966 they are mostly speak Indonesian, even chinese Indonesian also can fluently speak Indonesian.

@Rosie-et5fg Год назад

I think u must be liv in kalimantan Island right?

@sktzn6829 Год назад

4:21 Fun fact - the two main ways to say 'tea' in the different languages both come from China. One came from the Mandarin pronunciation "cha" e.g. chai, whilst the other comes from Hokkien "te" e.g. tea, thé, té

@larshofler8298 Год назад

Chai probably didn't come from Mandarin, probably from Cantonese instead. The maritime trade route only involved port cities like Canton, never the north. And tea was also grown in the south due to the climate, never the north.

@larshofler8298 Год назад

I think a lot of things people associate with China has little to do with the Mandarin-speaking North. Most of them are from indigenous cultures of the South.

@brianliew5901 Год назад

@@larshofler8298 Most of the Chinese immigrants to S.E. Asia and the West in form of laborers and indentured servants were from the South as you've pointed out, mostly thru' Canton and Shanghai.

@sktzn6829 Год назад

@@larshofler8298 Ah right I remember thinking that but I couldn't find an exact location for the origin so I just said Mandarin

@larshofler8298 Год назад

@@brianliew5901 True. Immigration out of Northern China is very recent, mostly in the past 20-30 years.

@hfdennycheng9010 Год назад

BY THE PRINCIPLE OF CHINESE CHARACTERS, THE READING VOICE IS DEPENDED ON WHICH KIND OF LANGUAGE YOU SPEAKING. THEREFORE, THE CHINESE CHARACTERS CAN ALSO CALL THEIR READING VOICE IN ENGLISH, SUCH AS : 馬、虎、水、火 YOU CAN DIRECTLY CALL THEM IN ENGLISH 馬=HORSE 虎=TIGER 水=WATER 火=FIRE

@Reazzurro90 Год назад

The Chinese situation is very similar to Italy's. There is Italian, the national language taught in all the schools, but there are a lot of regional tongues which are usually called dialects even though many are actually separate languages. A Sicilian speaking Sicilian would not easily understand someone in Venetp speaking Venetian. And funny enough, they're all subdivided into their own dialects which differentiate from town to town.

@dingus42 2 месяца назад

it is far greater than that, think of "Italy" as one region/language family on that map like "Min" or "Wu", with the other regions being Spain+Portugal, France, even English etc and then you can begin to grasp how varied they are

@pierreabbat6157 Год назад

Then there's Dungan, which is a Chinese language, but it's spoken outside China and written in Cyrillic.

@MrLantean Год назад

The Dungans are descendants of Hui Chinese from Northwest China who fled China during 1870s-1880s due to a failed rebellion and settled in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Their language is derived from 19th Century Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in Ganzu Province and is written in Cyrillic alphabets. Dungan language is influced by Russian and Turkic languages and incorporate loanwords from them. It is reported that there is varying degree of mutual intelligibility between Dungan and various Mandarin Chinese dialects and the Dungans are able to understand Central Plains varieties of Mandarin Chinese.

@marcelocarpinetti9184 Год назад

One thing that keeps me away from the idea of learning Chinese or Cantonese is the tone system. As a 50-year-old person whose listening ability is beginning to decrease, would I be able to really learn Chinese?

@56independent42 Год назад

If 90 year old chinese people are functioning members of Chinese society, you probably can to.

@CrisTryingToBeProductive Год назад

Unless you're actually getting deaf you should be able to recognize the tones even with a audition aid.

@storylearning Год назад

There’s only one way to find out! Don’t let it stop you.

@user-rc8kd9vn1q Год назад

The "9-tone" system in Cantonese was a traditional analysis, which now deemed redundant by most of the modern linguists (in fact, more accurately, 6 tones). It's easy to learn, with easy grammar, no tense, no word forms (i.e. go, went, gone; mouse, mice). Anyway, don't let the "tones" scare you! Even if you can't get the tones right, people will understand you. Contexts are always more important than tones.

@tedc9682 Год назад

I'm older than you. I'm low-intermediate in Chinese, and if I could start over I would ignore tones completely. Spoken sentences in natural speech do not have the pitch pattern you would expect from memorized tones in isolated words. It is far more complicated than that. It is similar to English: inFLATed, HAPpy, reDUNdant.

@BKPrice Год назад

That classroom footage was cuteness overload.

@mamborambo Год назад

Most Chinese "dialects" have millions of speakers more than most medium-size countries... It is pure politics that mandarin became the national language and not one of the widespread southern languages like hokkien or Cantonese.

@zabaanshenaas Год назад

Cantonese and Hokkien are my favourite Chinese languages, though I have more resources for Mandarin.

@nsevv Год назад

Canto is cool.

@GL-iv4rw Год назад

@user-ts6dh5pt2d Год назад

I think this is similar to the Philippine's linguistic identity...our national language is Filipino and the Philippines has two official languages, English and Filipino, but Filipino is mostly based on Tagalog and doesn't really contain much words from other Philippine languages that claims to be our "national" language which is technically just Tagalog, this makes millions of Filipinos and other people to think that languages such as Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon etc. are just dialects of the Filipino language and that erases so much of the diverse and complicated linguistic history of the Philippines dating back to when we were never one country and pre-colonial influences...It's also important to mention that the term for the "Filipino" language only came about in the past 20th century or so and these islands had to endure this complicated problem until today...You can check up on google or any search engine and most of these languages that Filipinos themselves think of as "dialects" are in fact LANGUAGESs. The four languages that I've just mentioned are part of the World's top 100 languages, so we really need to recognize these languages more... check up on google or any search engine and most of these languages that Filipinos themselves think of as "dialects" are in fact languages...

@sasino Год назад

What you're describing is nothing new, it has always happened in history that minority languages become "dialects" and only one language is recognized as the main one. For example in Italy, where I was born, there are so many regional languages but they are considered dialects of Italian, even though all those regions were not a single country before and each of them has its own culture

@ludvigsilva1 Год назад

大家好！我是墨西哥人、我从今年二月到现在都在学中文、我学习中文因为我想去中国旅游、我爱中国菜！

@user-ej5wz5tr6h Год назад

厉害了，老哥~~！！😳👍 精诚所加，金石为开

@zachchen9564 Год назад

Many people know Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Wu, Hokkien… are not mutually intelligible, but many people don’t know is even in the same language/dialect, it’s not always mutually intelligible. Take Mandarin (官話) as an example, people mistakenly think all Mandarins are the same, they are mutually intelligible, but actually, different varieties of Mandarins may mutually unintelligible. If you speak Putonghua or if you are studying Putonghua, you’ll have difficulty to understand other varieties of Mandarin. For example Once I went to Weifang, they speak Mandarin too but the different variety of Mandarin (Jiaoliao Mandarin), I heard two people chatting on the bus, and I couldn’t understand what were they talking about.

@kierahicks9314 Год назад

普通话也不是用一个小地方的方言变体，普通话之所以是普通话的基础源自7成的官话母语者，恰好借用了滦平的口音。

@rrenneee Год назад

I’m currently in university and taking Simplified/Mandarin courses. I love Chinese it’s such an interesting language but the hardest thing for me is all the different dialects and writing forms. My professor was from the northern part of the Beijing province so we are being taught the Beijing dialect and simplified script, which is great if you want to go to China. But I’ve always planned to live in Taiwan where they use the Traditional writing system for Chinese. It’s difficult because now I am learning both Traditional and Simplified writing, and I sometimes forget which one is which and write the wrong characters in class.

@qrsx66 Год назад

But are you really writing a "wrong" character, or the other correct one ?.. (maybe the better of the 2 if it's the one that correspond to a 2000 year usage)

@rrenneee Год назад

@@qrsx66 yes you’re right, it’s technically correct since they have the same meaning but since it’s a simplified class it’s automatically counted wrong on an exam if I write the traditional scripts instead of the simplified. I see how when I didn’t give the context it sounds like I’m implying that traditional is “wrong” and I by no means believe that. In some ways traditional makes more sense since the characters were made to look like the words they where representing. (I hope that makes more sense)

@colin-onioin Год назад

Actually, nobody really writes anything nowadays. We type everything.

@OsakaJoe01 Год назад

My Chinese professor was from the north too! I learned to say 哪儿 "na ER," with that R sound that the video spoke about. 😂

@jimtso9802 Год назад

I am a native speaker from Taiwan. Nowadays we rarely write Chinese by hand. When we enter Chinese with keyboards, it doesn't really matter they are simplified or traditional because we enter with Pinyin. You type what you pronounce in forms of alphabets. For native speakers, we can read both simplified and traditional. In the rare occasions of writing a note by hand, we are writing more and more simplified characters as a way of shorthand writing.

@marcelocarpinetti9184 Год назад

My everlasting question is how to learn Chinese using stories when you know no kanji? How Krashen’s comprehensible input theories work in relation to idiogram wrtiting systems?

@CrisTryingToBeProductive Год назад

Well stories is just the content, of course you need to learn the meaning of the hanzi and its pinyin (to learn pronunciation) until you learn the hanzi and you recognize it.

@storylearning Год назад

You need to learn to read Chinese characters. Hard, but necessary.

@tedc9682 Год назад

The first step in learning pinyin (phonetic Chinese). You gradually learn written characters as you learn vocabulary. It's the same as English: learn the word sound, the word meaning, and how to write it. All at the same time.

@nsevv Год назад

Better to learn Japanese, some Mandarin is already included.

@GL-iv4rw Год назад

@brinkermeers3196 5 месяцев назад

I'm a mixed Mancunian and Shanghainese. I try real hard to keep Shanghainese alive

@matthewheald8964 2 месяца назад

Interesting video. Also interesting to learn that Olly’s an Altaicist; have you ever discussed that theory anywhere on your channel?

@nicoleraheem1195 Год назад

Hakka sounds pretty 😍

@OsakaJoe01 Год назад

Cantonese is historically said to have "9 tones," but if you actually analyze it, it's 6 tones plus 3 "checked" tones. (Tones that end in k, p and t) The 3 checked tones can be said to fit into the 6 tones, and recently, that's exactly what a lot of scholars do. Just Google it and you'll see that nowadays you're taught 6 tones. I think it's simpler than that. As a musician, to my ears it sounds like there are actually 3 tones in a high and low register. 1 and 4 sound like falling tones one high, one low, 2 and 5 rising, one high, one low and 3 and 6 sound like flat mid-tones, one high one low. Fascinating video. I love how music is part of a lot of the local culture. I love music. It was fascinating for me to hear that every region has a genre of "opera." So beautiful and colorful. 🥰

@user-rc8kd9vn1q Год назад

You're right! The 9-tone approach was much influenced by the traditional Chinese Qieyun and somehow has lots of redundant analysis. What's more fascinating is, Cantonese shares lots of similarities from its non-Sinitic neighbor Zhuang (also w/ 6 tones, or "9 tones" if analysed using Qieyun) in Guangxi, and even Vietnamese (w/ 6 tones) and Thai (w/ 5 tones). I would say the substratum of Canto, Zhuang, Viet, Thai is very similar, or even of the same origin.

@omegabulldog5001 Год назад

Malaysian Chinese here;- Hakka on my father's side. Hokkien on my mom's side, speak Cantonese to friends and Mandarin with aunties/uncles/shopkeepers.

@peng6066 Год назад

I see me previous colleagues in this video it’s so fun hahaha

@aukumyuen6023 Год назад

As a middle age Malaysian Chinese, Cantonese is my mother tongue and Mandarin is my second language. I'm well versed in both. The sad fact is that Chinese dialects are dying here in Malaysia. Chinese parents here are not teaching their kids of their dialects anymore because Mandarin is considered the 'future Chinese language' and the most widely spoken Chinese presently. This is also happening in Guangdong province China - the hometown of Cantonese.

@somgears1589 Год назад

That is simple, learning takes time, and time is money. If you have the time, you can learn as many languages as you want. But not everyone has that kind of free time, so they make the more economical choice.

@hweiii 6 месяцев назад

It's also because the parents might have been English educated and can't pass on their mother tongues that well, and the schools only teach Mandarin

@kyliex6310 Год назад

I saw one quora post asking why China don't allow schools to teach their students in local dialect instead of forcing them to all use mandarin. I laughed my head off...How can you ever do that?!

@bingli8775 Год назад

Not sure the person who answered the question in quora ever been to China. The schools in China do teach students in their local languages or dialects as well as Mandarin Hanish. The schools in Tibet will have both Tibetan courses and Mandarin Hanish courses. My wife's primary school and secondary school use their local dialect (North-west Mandarin Hanish) to teach most courses. They only use standard Mandarin in Mandarin Hanish course.

@kyliex6310 Год назад

@@bingli8775 I think they are asking like why Shanghai schools don't teach in Shanghai-ese. Why Shenzhen schools don't teach in Catonese. :)

@RhapsodyinLingo Год назад

@@kyliex6310 well that needs fixing, doesn't it! The same way medieval scholars finally ditched Latin in favour of writing in their own languages.

@MsianFigSculptor Год назад

Awesome! Thanks for sharing. Now I can confuse my non Chinese friends further 🤣🤣🤣

@jennychuang808 Год назад

As a Taiwanese, I think you got the history that Standard Beijing Mandarin in 1955 became the national language WRONG After the Republic of China was established in 1912, there was more success in promoting a common national language. A Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was convened with delegates from the entire country.[34] A Dictionary of National Pronunciation (國音字典; 国音字典) was published in 1919, defining a hybrid pronunciation that did not match any existing speech.[35][36] Meanwhile, despite the lack of a workable standardized pronunciation, colloquial literature in written vernacular Chinese continued to develop apace.

@kwongyattsang4428 Год назад

I speak Cantonese, Mandarin and Polish. In my humble opinion I consider “Chinese” a similar term to “Slavic”. Slavic languages include Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak and etc. Many of them have so similar pronunciation and grammar, the only difference is perhaps the writing system - some use latin alphabet while some use cyrillic alphabet. Apart from languages, they have also similar cultures. The same like Chinese, it can be seen as a comprehensive term to describe different group of people: Cantonese, hakka, hokkien, Shanghainese, Manchurian, and etc. Their languages have similar grammar, writing system, pronunciation but they are not at all the same exact language. Same with their cultures.

@user-li8dt1vg5b Год назад

as someone who speaks polish as well... I beg to differ. To me if I didn't spend time learning and studying Russian it would sound almost completely foreign to me, like a monolingual Anglophone trying to parse French. Slavic cultures' similarities are also not exactly comparable to Chinese cultures, even the northern vs southern china divide is so large without touching on particular ethnicities like nomadic Manchus/Mongols.

@cao6496 Год назад

hehee thx for your opinion but are you sure manchurian and han words are similar? how similar? in what way?

@kwongyattsang4428 Год назад

@@cao6496 sorry i shouldn’t include manchurian or mongolian or tibetan etc

@iAxianguy Год назад

Interesting 🙂👍👏

@fishoverseasable Год назад

Hakka is a language group that matntain the tradition of Tang and Song official language from the middle China, so it is more close to mandarin than Cantonism. There folk songs also are from ancient Chinese music tradition too

@Souls_p_ Год назад

我很喜欢中国的人。我19岁。我学了中文在中学，所以我的中文普通。

@jimtso9802 Год назад

Thank you Olly for the great introduction to the Chinese language! I first heard of you when I read your Short Stories in Spanish and later the World War I and II series in Spanish. They were wonderful! Mandarin is my mother tongue and I also speak Taiwan Hokkien and Cantonese. I feel that Mandarin is the Chinese language most distant from its old Han origin because it was influenced by Mongolian and Manchu the most. Hokkien and Cantonese have kept a lot more ancient Han vocabulary that you can see on ancient Chinese literatures. China's political centers have always based in the North, therefore Mandarin (or Northern Han) has always been used as the 官話, the official language or the franca lingua of the governments. One interesting fact, the dialects of the two southern cities: Hangzhou is a quasi-Mandarin and Nanjing is Mandarin, which is totally distinct from the areas surrounding them. Hangzhou, Zhejiang was the capital of Southern Song Dynasty. The Songs escaped the Jing nation (a Manchu people) invasion from Kaifeng Henan. Nanjing was the capital of various dynasties resettled from the North.

@sheilanixon913 Год назад

Each symbol can be used to express nouns , verbs adverbs, adjectives and post positions etc. . Translated into English they say dog one, dog two , dog many as the only way of showing the plural. .Japanese and Korean use the same symbols and some symbols of their own The Japanese have a 52 phonetic sound vocabulary , which Japanese children learn before they start learn the symbols They all use the same written symbols , so they can understand the Written language , even though the spoken languages are very different , Chairman Mao even thought of using a new alphabet formed from the Latin and Russian alphabets , using the letters which most closely resemble Mandarin sounds , as a possible national language.

@andeeharry Год назад

thanks for sharing

@zikoraifenneli Год назад

Brilliant Olly!!This is why I call them the Sinitic Group of Languages.Because in reality, that is what they are.The language difference in China is so great that without Putonghua, communication in China would be impossible and I dare say Hazardous.

@GL-iv4rw Год назад

@wuhuhu1390 Год назад

Chinese is a language, a macrolanguage. It can also be defined as a group of languages or dialects--there's no broad consensus, just like Scots language, Standard German & Bavarian...etc. Mandarin 官话 is also known as Standard or Official Chinese, that's spoken in imperial court of Ming and Qing dynasty. Following the tradition, Mandarin was made national language in 1912 by KMT party (Republic of China). That's why it is also Taiwan's national language. Mao merely continued the same policy in 1950. China was unified in 221 BC under Qin dynasty (famous for Terracotta army). That was when Chinese script was standardized. But because Chinese script is non-phonetic, doesn't guide pronunciation, spoken form vary regionally despite sharing the same script.

@funkyfacy Год назад

The variation of written forms before qin dynasty was very much due to the wartime during 春秋战国… language can evolve pretty fast both in calligraphy and phonetics…phonetic is the worst form in preserving the essence of a language.

@andyyang5234 Год назад

Mandarin was not made national language in 1912. Instead, a commitee was convened and literally voted on how each of the 6500 characters should be pronounced. Due to the composition of the commitee, quite a few characters had a more southern sound, especially from Zhejiang. This system passed in 1913 was known as "老國音". However, it was soon discovered that this new system is highly impractical, primarily due to the fact that nobody can speak it properly, let alone teach it. The teachers themselves are making mistakes due to it largely being different from all the exisiting dialects. Therefore in 1923, a new commitee was formed, and settled on the Beijing standard on the practical standpoint that in 1920s China, Beijing had the largest number of teachers, and an excess can be sent elsewhere to teach Mandarin. This new set was named "新國音". So no. KMT didn't follow "tradition", but out of practicality.

@damistudi5923 Год назад

Finally someone who knows what he's talking about.

@dingus42 2 месяца назад

this makes 0 sense, would you say Latin is a "macrolanguage" and everyone in Europe speaks Latin, with their own dialects?

@zerocalvin Год назад

I'm chinese but I dont understand mandarin because i'm not from china and my mother language is cantonese aka kong tong wa which is roughly translated as the language of kong tong commonly know as guangdong in mandarin. funny thing is, my family also dont call ourself as chinese, we call ourself cantonese or kong tong yan and my grandma often reminded us that we are tong yan... which is odd because tong yan in movie and drama refer to people that lives in tang dynasty...

@chen-zhuqi4594 Год назад

Chinese people don't need to mention that they are Chinese people, but only where they come from (within China), in order to claim their origion or identity comparing to Chinese from other parts of China.

@chen-zhuqi4594 Год назад

"tong yan" stands for "(oversea) Chinese people" ; "tong yan gai" stands for "Chinatown", although "gai" means "street(s)"

@cwchia Год назад

there may not be the same words. Fore example the clip on the word umbrella, the Cantonese speaker speaks a single syllabus word "遮“ which in standard Mandarin, carries the meaning on "shielding someone or something". This word is used by the cantonese speakers to refer to umbrella

@chen-zhuqi4594 Год назад

It's true that the same character can be used differently. And another question ist, how or why did Cantonese come to use 遮 to name umbrella(s) instead of 伞 ?

@damian_madmansnest День назад

@@chen-zhuqi4594 That’s how languages naturally develop. Maybe when umbrellas originated people simply called them ‘covers’ 遮, then in some regions they invented a more specialised word 伞 which gradually spread as the new standard. But in Guangdong, far from the linguistic fashion of the capital, be it Luoyang, Chang'an or Beijing, they preferred to use the old word for centuries.

@edisonbai5688 Год назад

Well, to be fair, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese were also using the same writing system and it wasn’t designed to be the same, people who went to school for an office in the government would learn the official spoken language, which often differs from their local dialect, and spoken languages often didn’t match the written version due to high rate of illiteracy before the literature was simplified.

@Tomiagisiha_Aisingioro Год назад

Japanese writing is way more interesting as it’s combined both Chinese and Hebrew characters, but the speaking has a lot common with Hebrew and not really many with Chinese.

@eb.3764 Год назад

Dialect is a French word used by French people to diminish the prestige of regional languages in France.

@xenxx1192 9 месяцев назад

@@Tomiagisiha_Aisingiorohebrew? Are you smoking weeds?

@Tomiagisiha_Aisingioro 9 месяцев назад

@@xenxx1192 Google Japanese Hebrew similarities. You will know mate

@KJ-mp6uj 8 месяцев назад

Bitch plz, the high rates of illiteracy isn't caused by the "hard writing system", it's mainly caused by economics.

@thomasmoore9421 Год назад

I'm interested in being literate in Chinese but unsure if I should tie it to a spoken language. I only really want to be able to read & write it, though a basic understanding when it comes to speaking & listening could be useful. My 1st choice would be Cantonese, since I have ancestry from there. Any advice would be appreciated.

@joei8236 Год назад

im afraid that’s impossible, knowing how to “read” is equivalent to speak. You always start off listening, then memorize these sounds, later improves and correct yourself the pronunciation. You listen, then speak, later read, lastly write, Cantonese often uses traditional Chinese in writing, which is considered difficult for most, even for Chinese people. If you want to learn, you can star off learning PinYin(simplified Chinese spelling) or Jyutping(Yue Chinese spelling).

@YouTubeNoFreedom Год назад

Nice video!

@Magnalis Год назад

Brah as an ethnic Chinese person who has suffered much due to being a member of my race, cheers for a most educational video on Chinese 'dialects'!

@GL-iv4rw Год назад

@filipino437 Год назад

languages*

@user-rc8kd9vn1q Год назад

🤣.. By the way, the single ethnicity of Chinese is also questionable. I would consider "ethnic Cantonese", "ethnic Min" and "ethnic Wu" a better way of referring to the groups, because of the de-facto difference of their cultures.

@GL-iv4rw Год назад

@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Chinese = fake ethnicity That is like Spanish and Italians still calling themselves "Latin" China = fake country What's called "China" should be called Mandarin Empire instead

@hzhang1228 Год назад

@@user-rc8kd9vn1q Chinese is the nationality, i think you meant ethnicity of Han is pretty vague, which i agree, it was used by the northern nomads to refer to all peoples of China proper and did not see common usage by Han Chinese themselves until the Qing dynasty. before then people used their city/towns/provinces to self-identify amongst each other in the nation. the difference in culture if you want to split hairs can also be diverse enough to split cities but is all unified by the belief: Hua people of the Xia, decedents of the Flame and Yellow Emperor unified by the mandate of heaven.

@emperorXijingping Год назад

The concept is China is kind of like Europe, and mandarin is the simplified language to communicate through the whole country, kinds of like English, but simplified to frequently used words

@user-bw1ol3ut2k Год назад

“Chinese” is basically akin to “European” in terms of intrinsic lingual diversity.

@MsStar266 Год назад

I speak Cantonese (from my parents coming from Hong Kong), Hakka (my ancestry) and Mandarin (from learning).

@Silvia0719 Год назад

Very educational video. Happy to see that was made by a Westerner. Cuz many foreigners have mixed up this concept when we talking about Chinese and Mandarin. 🤣🤣🤣 Cantonese is my mother language. I can speak and listen to Mandarin. For Hakka, I only can listen but can't speak. The more interesting thing is that there are several types of Hakka depending on which area you lived in. My parents can speak 2 types of Hakka, esp my Mum, who is Chinese Indonesian. Her Hakka sounds a bit Cantonese, which is very easy to understand. This dialect is very common for those Chinese Indonesians who lived in West Kalimantan in Indonesia. Support your video! 😊😊

@BenjiSun Год назад

Technically Wenzhou-ese is influenced somewhat by Minbei (northern Min), so while it's mostly unintelligible by Jiangnan-ese speakers(Shanghainese is a dialect of Jiangnanese, aka Wu, aka Suzhe from Jiangsu+Zhejiang), Wenzhou-ese shares some similarities and some at least partially intelligible with Minbei speakers... or at least some parts of Wenzhou does. (浙南閩語).

@xlben10 Год назад

Wow as a singaporean chinese of hokkien descent, i am surprise you know all of this

@xxmrec Год назад

Language only records sounds and their corresponding meanings. Scripts (writing systems) record meaning. Chinese characters can be pronounced in many languages, but the meaning of the characters has been stable for thousands of years, so Chinese people have no trouble reading documents from more than 2,000 years ago.

@chen-zhuqi4594 Год назад

this is true ...

@vivredanslaverite8799 Год назад

I speak Cantonese so it’s basically a different language than Mandarin Chinese

@56independent42 Год назад

So is China as diverse as Europe in terms of language? You have Spanish with many dialects, entire families of language, and even some mysteries like Basque.

@just_some_guy_innit Год назад

yeah it is

@user-rc8kd9vn1q Год назад

If it's not a country, then they would be called different languages like the European ones.

@56independent42 Год назад

@@user-rc8kd9vn1q They are. Watch the video to find the names.

@qrsx66 Год назад

I would say it's more diverse and less diverse at the same time. It has more absolute diversity in term of number of languages spoken. But Europe has more relative diversity because each of the European language has a good chunk of locutors and none dominate the landscape. In China, only Mandarin dominates and the others have smaller chunks, and shrinking. (and I personally deplore and hate this situation)

@qrsx66 Год назад

@@56independent42 And here are many more names if you go into detail for each branches.