Resources

• Mandarin or Cantonese?

There are many regional dialects and variations of the Chinese language. However there are two main categories: Mandarin and Cantonese.
Mandarin is the most used dialect of Chinese as it is the official language of the People's Republic of China (mainland China). It is also used in Taiwan, Singapore and the United Nations.
Cantonese differs from its mainland relative and is spoken in the Canton (or Guangdong) province in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao. More...

The basic unit of Chinese morpheme is “character”. Those which are frequently used are called “basic characters”. The basic characters in HSK (China´s Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, also known as  the Chinese Proficiency Test) are 1,604. According to the statistics from Modern Chinese Frequency Dictionary, about 2,000 characters are in common used. More... 

• Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese?

As there are differences in spoken Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), there are differences in written Chinese as well. Today, Chinese characters come in two forms: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. 
The basic difference between them is that the traditional form is still based on earlier characters and uses more strokes. The more modern simplified characters are a lot simpler.

Simplified Chinese character is officially used in Mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia and the United Nations.

Traditional Chinese character is officially used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and also commonly used in overseas Chinese communities. More...