🇨🇳 What Language Do They Speak in China?
The short answer
China's official language is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua), taught in every school and spoken by the large majority. But China is home to hundreds of Chinese varieties — Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien and more — which can be as different from Mandarin as Spanish is from French.
Worth knowing
- ●Mandarin is the world's most spoken first language, with over 900 million native speakers
- ●The shared writing system lets speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties read the same text
- ●Mandarin has four tones — the same syllable can mean 'mother', 'hemp', 'horse' or 'scold' depending on pitch
Going to China? Say your first words before you land.
Yap gives you a real 30-second spoken conversation in Chinese every day — role-play the café, the taxi and the market with an AI tutor that listens and gently corrects. Four weeks of that beats any phrasebook.