The World's Most Widely Spoken Language
Mandarin is. It is the official language of the People's Republic of China, and one of the official languages of Singapore. Overseas Chinese communities around the world also often speak Mandarin.
Mandarin has a reputation as a difficult language to learn. The tonal system - whereby tones as well as consonants and vowels are used to differentiate words - is a challenge to those whose own languages are not tonal. Chinese characters are also a challenge to memorize. It is often said that knowledge of 3000 characters is enough to read a newspaper, but most educated Chinese are reckoned to know around 8000 characters. However, there is some good news for the foreign learner: grammar is fairly simple compared to many European languages, and verbs do not change.
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