Chinese is spoken by over a billion people and it is the official language in three countries: China, Taiwan and Singapore. The language is divided into five main dialectal groups: Mandarin, Yue, Min, Wu and Hakka. Furthermore, these can be divided into 200 separate dialects.

Chinese is also spoken in the famous “Chinatowns” across the world, but most notably in the USA.

More interesting facts about Chinese:

• The Chinese characters are the oldest writing system in the world still used today.
• To read a Chinese newspaper, one should know at least 2000 Chinese characters.
• Chinese used to be written from top to bottom . Meanwhile, however, as in the West, the writing from left to right is common.
• Overall, about one fifth of the world’s population has Chinese as their mother tongue.