Is Mandarin the Same as Chinese? // The Short Answer

Not exactly. Chinese is the language, an umbrella term for many dialects, and Mandarin is one of those dialects, alongside Cantonese, Shanghainese and many more.

Mandarin is the most widely spoken dialect, and its standard form, 普通话 (pǔtōnghuà), is used in schools, government and the news.

In everyday English, saying ‘I’m learning Chinese’ is fine, because almost every course labelled ‘Chinese’ teaches Standard Mandarin.

Chinese vs Mandarin – are they really the same? Which should I use?

The difference between Chinese and Mandarin tends to cause a lot of confusion among beginner students.

So here’s the deal…

Chinese is the umbrella term, and Mandarin is one variety of it, the biggest one by far. Other varieties include Shanghainese, Cantonese and many more.

In China these varieties are traditionally called 方言 (fāngyán), usually translated as ‘dialects’, and that’s the word we use in this article. Linguists often treat the big ones, such as Cantonese and Shanghainese, as separate languages, because speakers can’t understand each other out loud, a bit like Spanish and Italian.

Yes, it’s that easy. Chinese vs Mandarin difference even clearer;

Mandarin = Dialect (of Chinese)

Chinese = Language

Look at it like this…

🇬🇧 With English in England you have a number of dialects – Cockney, Scouse, Geordie etc.

🇺🇸 With English in America you have a number of dialects – Texan, Bostonian, Floridian etc.

🇨🇳 With Chinese in China you have a number of dialects – Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese etc.

It’s that simple, at least on paper!

TIP💡 So which word should you use? In everyday English, ‘Chinese’ is fine: say ‘I’m learning Chinese’ and people will assume Mandarin. Almost every course, textbook, app and university program labelled ‘Chinese’ teaches Standard Mandarin.

Say Mandarin when you need to be precise, for example when you’re comparing it with Cantonese or choosing a course. And because written Chinese is shared, ‘Chinese’ is the right word for the characters themselves.

But of course, there’s more to discover!

Lots more. We get asked a tonne of questions about Chinese, the dialects, who speaks what and much more, so the point of this article is to answer those commonly asked questions.

Chinese vs Mandarin FAQ #1 || Do All Chinese Speak Mandarin?

Chinese vs Mandarin FAQ #2 || Can Cantonese Speakers Understand Mandarin?

Chinese vs Mandarin FAQ #3 || Do Hong Kongers Speak Mandarin?

Chinese vs Mandarin FAQ #4 || Who Uses Traditional Chinese?

BONUS || SUPER USEFUL – Key Phrases in Mandarin, Shanghainese and Cantonese

Chinese vs Mandarin – Quick Facts

Chinese vs Mandarin – Other Dialects

Chinese vs Mandarin – The Alphabet

Firstly check out what people think of the language spoken in Shanghai, as Nathan takes us on a tour of the great city.

Of course, if you have more questions, comment below.
We’ll always be here to help you!

Do All Chinese Speak Mandarin?

Most people in China speak standard Mandarin, but not all. Mandarin is the most widely spoken variety of Chinese and has more native speakers than any other language in the world. If you count second-language speakers too, English comes out on top, with Mandarin close behind.

Chengde, 3 hours north of Beijing, is often called the birthplace of standard Mandarin, because the local accent is so close to the official Beijing-based pronunciation. Today Mandarin is widely spoken throughout mainland China.

DID YOU KNOW – because of this we offer courses in Chengde allowing our students to speak, and be exposed to, the most standard Mandarin in all of China. You’ll meet very few foreigners in Chengde, so you end up using your Chinese all day, every day.

💡 Standard doesn’t mean every Mandarin speaker sounds the same. Locals in Beijing add a little ‘r’ sound to many words, called 儿化 (érhuà), so 一点 (yìdiǎn, a little) becomes 一点儿 (yìdiǎnr). In many southern cities you’ll hear zh, ch and sh softened to z, c and s. These are accents of Mandarin, not separate dialects, and with a bit of exposure you’ll understand them.

Local dialects in some areas are spoken but generally, you could travel anywhere in China and can hear Mandarin spoken.

FOR EXAMPLE – you could visit Beihai, in the south of China and be exposed to a mixture of the local dialect, and also standard Mandarin from the northerners who have moved down south for a warmer life to the arctic north!

It’s not until you reach super rural villages far away from any top-tier cities that Mandarin may become hard to come by. Here, local dialects may replace the mandarin dialect of Chinese.

Can Cantonese Speakers Understand Mandarin?

Cantonese speakers can generally understand Mandarin. But it’s worth noting, if you listen to each dialect, you will realise they sound nothing alike.

Whereas on paper, a Mandarin or Cantonese speaker could both read and understand the same text, when read out aloud, they sound completely different.

Even hello in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese is different, something that we will come to shortly. For a closer look at tones, vocabulary and grammar, see our guide to the Mandarin and Cantonese differences.

Do Hong Kongers Speak Mandarin?

Many Hong Kongers can speak Mandarin, yes, but Cantonese is the language of choice in Hong Kong, followed by English.

Cantonese is what you’ll hear in everyday life, at home, on the MTR and in most shops and restaurants, so don’t expect Mandarin to be the default in the city.

That said, many Hong Kongers can indeed speak and understand Mandarin with no problems at all.

Who Uses Traditional Chinese?

Traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

Mainland China uses Simplified Chinese, as does Singapore, where Mandarin is one of four official languages spoken.

The main difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese is the number of strokes, as you can see below. Our guide to simplified versus traditional characters explains which one to learn first.

Simplified, funnily enough, appears much more simple to read and write, whereas Traditional comes across much more complex at first glance.

SUPER USEFUL – Key Phrases in Mandarin, Shanghainese and Cantonese

Just to illustrate how Chinese can differ between dialects we’ve taken three of the most common dialects below and shown you how they are read in these dialects.

Here are 10 basic phrases in Mandarin vs Cantonese vs Shanghainese.

See how there is little relation?

Even when the characters match, they are spoken completely differently.

Don’t be put off if you’ve made great strides with your Mandarin and you go out in Hong Kong or Shanghai for example, and you understand little, this will just be the local dialect.

Find some Mandarin speakers and you’ll be right on track!

DID YOU KNOW – Mandarin in Chinese is 普通话 (pǔtōnghuà), which literally translates to ‘common tongue’. It’s the official standard form of Mandarin, also called Standard Chinese. Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect and its grammar on modern written vernacular Chinese, and it’s the Mandarin used in schools, government and the news.

You’ll hear other names for the same standard language depending on the city you’re in:

As we’ve touched upon already, Chinese is the umbrella term for a vast number of dialects, all of which we won’t delve into right now!

However, just to give you an idea of how Mandarin dwarfs the other dialects see here…

Gathering exact data for these dialects is nigh-on impossible, but this gives you a fair idea of how Mandarin compares to the Wu dialect (of which Shanghainese is included) and the Yue dialect (of which Cantonese is included), alongside all other minor dialects.

The Wu dialect is mainly used in Shanghai, Zhejiang and southern Jiangsu, while the Yue dialect covers Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong and Macau. We’ll touch on more of these shortly.

Chinese vs Mandarin – Quick Facts

Here are some bite-sized facts that we think you’ll also find useful.

• Mandarin has 4 tones (plus a neutral 5th), and Cantonese has 6 tones (or indeed 9 tones if you include the checked tones).
• Mandarin has well over 1 billion speakers worldwide, counting native and second-language speakers.
• Cantonese has over 60 million speakers worldwide.
• Shanghainese has around 10 million speakers, most of them in and around Shanghai, and fewer young people use it at home today.
• The Chinese language has over 50,000 characters, but you need far fewer to read comfortably. To put that into perspective, the top band of the HSK exam, the combined HSK 7-9 test, expects you to recognise around 3,000 characters.

• There is no known number of how many Chinese dialects there are. But experts believe there to be over 200.
• Chinese handwriting, especially fast cursive notes, can be very hard for learners to read, even once you know the characters in print.
• There are a number of loanwords used in the Chinese language. You can find out some of these in our guide to Chinese loanwords article.
• Chinese characters are also used in one of the three Japanese writing systems, kanji. Pronunciation differs, and the meaning is often, though not always, the same. For example, 日本 (rìběn) means Japan in both languages, it’s just pronounced differently.

Chinese Loanwords // Borrowed Words in English and Chinese

An introduction to Chinese loanwords in English and English Loanwords in Chinese. Since China began opening up, there are more & more!

Chinese vs Mandarin – Other Dialects

As we’ve already mentioned, Chinese is made up of well over 200 dialects. For the full picture, see our guide to all the languages spoken in China.

Rather than take you through every single one, here are the most well-known and where they are commonly spoken:

Chinese vs Mandarin – The Alphabet

Another question we commonly hear from beginners is:

Does Chinese have an Alphabet?

In short, the answer is no. As we quote in our big guide on the “Chinese Alphabet”…

In English we have 26 letters in the alphabet, in Russian we have 33 in the Cyrillic alphabet, but…

There is no such thing as the Chinese Alphabet.

Chinese is all about characters and we don’t put them together like we do with letters in our alphabets to make a word because these characters actually make up words themselves.

Each character is one syllable. One character on its own can be a word, but many words are made up of two, three or even more characters put together.

What Chinese does have is a way to write sounds. Most learners start with Pinyin, the official romanisation used in classrooms from Beijing to Singapore, which writes 你好 as nǐ hǎo with tone marks. In Taipei and Kaohsiung, children learn Zhuyin, also called Bopomofo, a set of 37 phonetic symbols that begins ㄅㄆㄇㄈ (b, p, m, f).

Neither Pinyin nor Zhuyin replaces characters. They’re tools for learning pronunciation and for typing.

If you want to find out more about this topic we recommend you visit the link above, we go into great detail about this OR alternatively, grab a cuppa and watch us talk about it instead…

Final Note…

So there you have it, your complete guide to Chinese vs Mandarin. Hopefully you now know the key differences.

Remember – Chinese is a language that is formed of many, many dialects, and Mandarin is just one of those.

Any questions? Comment below with your thoughts on Chinese vs Mandarin, we’ll be happy to add any more questions to our blog if you so wish!

So which one should you learn? For most people, the answer is Mandarin. It’s the standard language of schools, business and the media from Beijing to Chengdu, it’s an official language in Singapore, and it’s what the HSK exam tests, so it opens the most doors for work, travel and study.

Cantonese makes sense if your family speaks it or you plan to live in Hong Kong or Guangzhou, and plenty of learners add it once their Mandarin is solid.

Mandarin is hard, we won’t pretend otherwise, but the payoff is huge. You can talk with over a billion people, read signs and menus in any Chinese-speaking city, and stand out with employers who work with Asia.

Now it’s time to start studying Mandarin… just like Tobias and Mikkel did here! Enjoy, and when you’re ready, find your perfect Mandarin program.

Curious about other languages of the Far East? How about Japanese and Korean?

Discover how they differ and relate to Mandarin in our Japanese vs Korean vs Mandarin blog – which is really the hardest?

Chinese vs Mandarin – FAQs

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