Useful Chinese Words & Phrases for Visiting China

Things to know about Chinese languages of China:
• In a population of roughly 1.4 billion, China has 302 individual living languages. To put that in perspective globally, an astonishing 20% of the world’s population speaks some form of a Chinese language naively.
• The official language in China is called Putonghua (普通话), literally translated as 'common speech', which is known in English as Mandarin Chinese, or Standard Chinese. It is the most widely used language in China and the world at large, and one of the 6 official languages of the United Nations. Mandarin Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, and is the shared language of most Chinese people.
Chinese people who speak other languages, often also speak or use Mandarin as their second language.
• If you intend to learn Chinese, it is most useful to learn Mandarin Chinese. While written forms of Mandarin maintain a rigid standard across the country, the dialects of China vary widely in their pronunciation patterns.
• Of the other varieties of Chinese spoken by the many ethnic groups of China, the most widely used and well known are Cantonese,Hakka,Shanghainese, and Sichuanese. Chinese (漢語) comprises of seven main dialects, Mandarin (官話),Cantonese (廣州話, 廣府話),Hakka (客家話), Wu (吳語), Min (閩語), Xiang (湘語), and Gan (贛語) (figure).
• Mandarin, the dialect spoken in the north is the official national language of mainland China and is termed Pŭtōnghuà (普通話,Common language).
• Some 250 million people in China speak seven major languages and dialects other than Mandarin. They would almost certainly understand you speaking in Standard Chinese, but there’s a good chance you would understand them if they spoken in their native Mandarin language.
• Politically, Standard Chinese is controversial because it is pretty much been designed and applied top-down by the central government to every place in China, regardless of what local languages exist there and what might be most beneficial for speakers there. The called dialects in Chinese books, though mutually unintelligible between people speaking them.
• The main languages or dialects of this subgroup are: Mandarin, Wu, Jin, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Min and Yue. All these languages have their dialects, some times very different.In addition to the previously noted divisions, there is also Putonghua and Guoyu, the official languages of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, respectively. These are based on the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing, and are intended to transcend all of China as a common language of communication. It is therefore the common Chinese language (as these are often called) that is the language of government, of the media, and of instruction in schools.
• In the modern Chinese languages, the majority of characters are phonetically based rather than logo graphically based.