Contrary to common belief, the most widely spoken language in the world is not English, but Mandarin Chinese. Research conducted in the last years points out that Mandarin is spoken by about 1 billion people in the world, being followed by Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic. Surprisingly, in the 16th edition of Ethnologue, French and Italian are not even included in the top 10 most spoken languages, although they are of international use. Pretty amazing findings, isn’t it? In other words, if someone would be able to perceive sounds from outside Earth, the loudest ones would be in Chinese.

On one hand, if we think from a demographic perspective, the supremacy of the Chinese should not come as a surprise. Chinese are after all the most numerous nation on the planet. But one the other hand, people speaking Chinese are pooled together in one side of the world, which makes it not a very popular language, in spite of its supremacy in terms of number of speakers. English, for instance, although is spoken by less then a half people, has the advantage of being spread in all corners of the world, which leads to the impression that it is the most spoken language.

Many people know very little about Chinese, not to mention that most of the non-native-speakers can’t say a single word in this language. So let’s see what are the most interesting facts about the most spoken language on Earth:

Mandarin Chinese is the official language in China, Taiwan, one of the fourth official languages in Singapore and one of the six in the United States.

• Mandarin became the official language in China starting with 1644 when Manchu overthrew the Ming dynasty.
• Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, which means that one word can describe different concepts, according to the used tone. Mandarin features four tones: flat, rising, falling then rising and falling.
• Mandarin words have one grammatical form. This means that there are no variations for singular/plural, no verbal tenses, voices, genders, or persons. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, it is not simple at all, because, in exchange, Mandarin has a very complicated system of suffixes, which does not resemble to any of the ones used in the European languages.
• The written Mandarin counts around 50,000 characters, but actually only 5,000 are being taught in the secondary school and about 3,000 are needed to read a newspaper.

And here is a nice one: the word “mandarin” is not Chinese, it is based on a combination of Sanskrit and Portuguese, meaning “commanders”. After all, Chinese rules the world languages.

If the facts presented above make you doubt your ability to learn Mandarin Chinese, I will only tell you this: Shijieshang meiyou buneng kefu de kunnan. In other words (English), there is no difficulty in the world that cannot be overcome.

If you want to join the large community of Chinese speakers, make the first step at Fluent Future. Here you can learn a language for free, meeting native speakers of the language you are seeking to learn, or pay rated teachers for individual lessons.

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