Phrasebook (China)

It is believed that Chinese writing originated almost four thousand years ago and that the spoken language goes back many thousands of years before that, thus Chinese is one of the world’s oldest languages and even today one of the most widely used living languages. 

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. The standard Chinese language, spoken by most of the population is ‘Hanyu’, meaning ‘language of the Han’. Standard Chinese is referred to as ‘Putonghua’, also known as “Mandarin”.

Below is a list of the most common words and phrases you are most likely to need whilst in China. This has been translated to the phonetic alphabet to make it easier to pronounce.