Actually, there are many forms of spoken Chinese. Although most language experts consider Chinese to be one language, some say the variations are so distinct that they should be considered separate languages.

Mandarin Chinese is the official language of China and Taiwan and one of the official languages in the country of Singapore. Cantonese Chinese is one of two official tongues of Hong Kong and the Chinese region of Macau. Most citizens of China can speak more than one variation of Chinese.

All speakers of Chinese, however, share the same written language, which uses characters instead of letters. Unlike all other written languages, Chinese uses a writing system in which individual characters represent individual words. These characters often mean one thing when used alone but something else when combined.

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, which also includes Tibetan and Burmese. It is not related to Japanese or Korean, although these languages use Chinese characters in their written forms.