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The Chinese Language
Chinese is many langauges in one, as there are at least six forms of Chinese, among which Hakka Chinese, Mandarin, Min Dong, Min Nan, Pu-Xian, Yue. Due to this variety, about one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as its native language and Chinese results to be the language with the most native speakers (around 1.2 billion).Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
Dialects
While written Chinese is based on a code shared and known by everyone, the spoken language has a great variety of dialects, or better called forms, often so different one with the other that they are unintellegible.The standard language is Mandarine, which is used in education and is recognised as the official language of People's Republic of China and Taiwan. Guoyu is the language of education in Taiwan, while in Singapore and Malaysia it is Huayu. In some countries, it is said that the language of Tv is the standard one, but for China this is not a guarantee. Indeed, Beijing's anchorpersons, with the aim of imitating the standard dialect, sound unnatural and force their tone a little bit. On the contrary, while the Taiwanese tv folks speak in a more natural way, sometimes they use obsolete forms and the typical Taiwanese consonants, which sound quite far from correct Chinese. For these and a number of other regions, it is possible that the only real speakers of Standard Chinese are professors in important Universities.
Grammar
The first difficulty arising when studying Chinese is undoubtely the script. Chinese script is made up of isolated syllabes and one word corresponds to a syllable. Although this might seem a simplification, in reality it complicates things a little bit: given to the fact that there are very few syllabes, many words sound virtually identical and for learners it could be quite complicating distinguishing a word from another. If for foreigners the Chinese script still is a problem, for native speakers it represents the only universal mean of communication. Indeed, there is a single script for all dialects, so that every Chinese speaker knows the same writing system and people whose dialects are totally unintellegible can communicate using the script.Once you have tickled the alphabet's problem, it's time for facing the grammar, which is quite different from that of the romance languages. Chinese grammar is quite simple as for conjugation or inflection, as words have only one grammatical form and verb tenses are expressed in a syntactical way. Things complicate a little bit with syntaxis, first of all because Chinese is a "topic-prominent" language, and often the topic comes at the beginning of the sentence. As a consequence, curious constructions which correspond to "Today climb mountains, tomorrow camp outdoors" or "Swim[ming] I am the best" sound perfectely correct. Another bizarre rule is the "serial-verb" construction, which uses two connected-verbs, as in "this movie I look-no-understand", which expresses "I can't understand this movie (even though I watched it)".
Chinese Idioms
And here you will find a list of some nice Chinese idioms with their translation to English. If you use them, you will impress your speaker..They are authentical pearls of wisdom!The first two can be used when you are working...
Bu Ru Hu Xue, Yan De Hu Ze - "How can (we) retrieve the baby tiger without going into the tiger's nest?" - Great Rewards usually require a great degree of risk.
Chen Feng Po Lon - "Ride the wind and Break the waves" - Used to describe those who trie hard to achieve their ambitions.
The next is what you should never become during your stay in China.
Hu Ja Hu Wei - "Fake fox, Fearsome tiger" - Describes those who are weak themselves but hide behind a powerful source to harm others.
..And the last is what is strongly recommended if you want to become rich and famous
Ku Kou Pou Shin - "Bitter Mouth, Old lady's heart" - Used to describe those who tries VERY hard to persuade others.