Chinese  

Standard Chinese is a form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.

Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many other ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people (around 16% of the world's population) speak some form of Chinese as their first language.

It is the official language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is also spoken in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

The written form of the standard language is based on the logograms known as Chinese characters.

Altogether there are over 50,000 Chinese characters, though a dictionary will rarely list over 20,000. An educated Chinese person will know about 8,000 characters, but will only need about 2,000-3,000 to be able to read a newspaper.