fun fact

Chinese is number 6, first is English. The Chinese world is considered to be made up of: Mainland China- population of 1.3 billion Taiwan- population of 23 million Hong Kong- population of 7 million Singapore- population of 4 million Macau- population of 451,000 Overseas Chinese- population of 35- 40 million (est.) That is 20% of entire world population. Means that 20% of world population speaks Chinese. This statistics are talking about primary lingo. After weighing six factors (number of primary speakers, number of secondary speakers, number and population of countries where used, number of major fields using the language internationally, economic power of countries using the languages, and socio-literary prestige); chinese is number 6, first is English.

there's different chines language,i've hear there's the mandarin,cantonese,wu,Hakka,Xiang and more

really? are you sure? sorry for having doubts. but i really thought it's english. most filipinos are fluent in english and even i communicate ot people around the world in english. english seems to unite us all no matter where we maybe from. that's why i really thought it's english. hmmm.. still having doubts if it's really chinese. hehe.

But only chinese people speak that language. Am I right? OK there are a few exceptions.

Hey friend, come on you don't actually believe that do you? Europeans, Canadians, Americans, South Americans, Phillipinos, Malaysians, Indians etc speak English as their second language. Yes there are some countries in Asia who do not have English as their second language but there are even lesser countries in the world that has Chinese as their second language. Just because 1 billion Chinese speak Chinese doesn't make it the most widely spoken language, it has to be spoken by non Chinese too and so far only English achieves that.

I did not know that. It makes sense. Asia is the most populated continent. Thanks for sharing :)

Depends how you look at it. There are many Chinese dialects, and they have to learn Mandarin, the official language, to be able to communicate between dialects. I was in a class learning Mandarin, and most of the students were Chinese. More Chinese speak English as a second language than English speakers speak Chinese. I saw a thing on Xinhua a while back, Chinese readers talking about why they have to learn English. Probably just as well they speak English, too, because some Chinese translations by native English speakers are so bad it's beyond a joke.

really? are you sure about that? i though english is the number one but i guess it cant be wrong, i watch a tv show where people that speak english move to hong kong and learning chinese too.

chinese is the most spoken language in the world,just because her population is so large.but english is the most worldwide and is the most second-spoken language.very student in china must learn english ,and the english is a required course.you see,i am a chinese but i chat with you in english.

I have got some facts to share about chienese language -- The Chinese language is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although most Chinese view the many varieties of spoken Chinese as a single language, the variations in spoken language are comparable to those of Romance languages; the written language has also changed over time, though far more slowly than the spoken language, and hence has been able to transcend much of the variation in spoken language. About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as its native language, making it the language with the most native speakers. The Chinese language (spoken in its standard Mandarin form) is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations. The terms and concepts used by Chinese to think about language are different from those used in the West, partly because of the unifying effects of the Chinese characters used in writing, and partly because of differences in the political and social development of China in comparison with Europe. Whereas after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe fragmented into small nation-states, the identities of which were often defined by language, China was able to preserve cultural and political unity through the same period. One major difference between Chinese concepts of language and Western concepts is that Chinese makes a sharp distinction between written language (wen) and spoken language (yu). This distinction extends to the distinction between written word (zi) and spoken word (hua). The concept of a distinct and unified combination of both written and spoken forms of language is much less strong in Chinese than in the West. There are a variety of spoken Chinese, the most prominent of which is Mandarin. There is however only one uniform written script. (See section below). Spoken Chinese is a tonal language related to Tibetan and Burmese, but genetically unrelated to other neighbouring languages, such as Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and Japanese. However, these languages were strongly influenced by Chinese in the course of history, linguistically and also extralinguistically. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters, which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. In North Korea, Hanja has been completely discontinued and Hangul is the sole way to express their language, while in South Korea, Hanja is used as a form of bold face. Along with those two languages, Vietnamese also contains many Chinese loanwords and formerly used Chinese characters.