Chinese words for every day: days, months, numbers and greetings

Characters, pinyin and tones: how Chinese words are written

• 汉语Chinese language simplified
• 漢語Chinese language traditional
• HànyǔChinese language pinyin

Chinese is written in characters, each standing for one syllable with a meaning. English Wikipedia's article on the language describes the two systems in use today. Traditional characters are used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and many overseas communities. Simplified characters were introduced by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote literacy, and Singapore adopted them as the second country to do so. Many basic Chinese words, including every day of the week and every month, are written identically in both; others, such as the word for goodbye, differ by one character.

Pronunciation is written with pinyin, the romanisation introduced in 1956, later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan and now used almost everywhere to teach the language. Pinyin marks four tones with accents: mā, má, mǎ, mà are four different words. In Taiwan, the semi-syllabary bopomofo, or zhuyin, still helps readers with pronunciation; the Bopomofo table on this site lists its symbols.

English Wikipedia describes the Chinese varieties as largely analytic: words keep one form, and word order and small particles carry the grammar. Chinese also has no capital letters. That makes the basic vocabulary quick to read once the characters are known, and the four topic pages below show how far numbers alone go, since days and months are built from them.

The Kangxi radicals are the 214 components by which characters are sorted in dictionaries, and the East Asian word list puts 243 Chinese words in both scripts and pinyin beside Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other languages of the region.

Where Chinese is an official language

Standard Chinese, often called Mandarin, is the official language of both China and Taiwan, one of the four official languages of Singapore and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. It is based on the Beijing dialect; on the mainland it is called Putonghua, common speech, and in Taiwan Guoyu, national language.

Chinese as a whole is a family of varieties. English Wikipedia's article counts about 1.39 billion first-language speakers of one of them, and Mandarin is by far the largest group at roughly 800 million. Cantonese, Wu (which includes Shanghainese) and Min are among the others, and many are not mutually intelligible. The Chinese words on these pages are Standard Chinese as spoken on the mainland, with Taiwan's forms noted where they differ.

The subdivisions of China page lists the 34 province-level units with their ISO 3166-2 codes and their names in Chinese and the regional languages.