Mandarin Chinese, which is also known as pútónghùa, zhōngwén, hànyǔ, and guǒyǔ, is spoken in China and Taiwan as a native language. Due to its popularity, Mandarin is also used in different countries all over the world such as Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines…….In fact, Mandarin is one of the most broadly spoken languages in the world together with English and Spanish.

People in different areas of China speak different dialects as Min Nan, Hakka, Fujian, Cantonese, etc, which may sound very different to standard Mandarin. Fortunately, the meaning and the written language is the same for all kinds of Chinese dialects.

Generally speaking, students prefer to write simplified instead of traditional Chinese characters as they are much more simple. One of the ways to master the characters, to understand the two, they are in fact interconnected with each other. Taiwanese uses traditional characters only while Chinese uses simplified characters. However, not every Chinese character has both simplified and traditional versions, so sometimes you may have no option but to write the complicated form.