WHICH CHINESE LANGUAGE DO I USE..?

Here’s a very simple explanation of the usages of the Chinese languages…

Simplified Chinese is the written language in mainland China, and is often used in Singapore, and by the Chinese community in Malaysia.

Mandarin is the spoken language for around 70% of mainland China, and is common in northern and southwestern China. It is also spoken in Taiwan, and is one of the four official languages in Singapore.

Traditional Chinese is the written language largely used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Cantonese is the spoken language largely used in Hong Kong, as well as in Macau and the Guangdong province in mainland China, including Guangzhou.

Pinyin is the most commonly used phonetic system for writing Mandarin using the Latin alphabet.

Most Simplified Chinese users can read Traditional Chinese, and vice-versa. However, there are hundreds of Simplified Chinese characters that are very different to their Traditional Chinese equivalents.

One way to tell them apart at a glance, is the location of the punctuation. Simplified Chinese punctuation is positioned at the bottom (similar to English), whereas Traditional Chinese punctuation is positioned in the middle.

Mandarin and Cantonese spoken languages are very different. In simple terms, it is like comparing English and French.

We strongly recommend using the correct language for each target market. Your brand may be affected if you get it wrong…

As a side note, the Japanese language uses many Chinese characters, known as kanji, in addition to their other two writing systems, hiragana, and katakana.