Chinese varieties are spoken by around 1,300 million people.
Chinese is written using a system of writing based ideographs, that is, symbols representing an entire word, whereas most other languages such as English are based on alphabets. An example of an ideograph in English would be the symbol '6', which represents the spoken word 'six'. Until recently, Chinese was written solely with ideographs. Nowadays, there is prominent usage of an alphabetical system used to record the Mandarin dialect, known as pinyin. Pinyin is generally used as a supplement beneath Chinese Characters in street signs, and in dictionaries and children's books, and is rarely written alone, without the presence of Chinese characters. Theoretically, it could be used to master spoken Chinese, insofar as it can be used as effectively as any spoken Chinese can be. Unfortunately however, it would not allow access to most Chinese publications. On top of that, most Chinese language teaching publications place a heavy emphasis on written Chinese characters once a basic vocabulary has been established with pinyin. What this means is that if you want to learn to speak Chinese fluently, you are often forced to learn a large vocabulary of Chinese characters in order to master the more advanced grammar. On the other hand, this isn't always the case, and many publications, especially grammar books, provide example sentences in pinyin and two versions of the Chinese characters, the 'traditional' version, and the 'simplified' version.
For example:
da ma chi fan. (pinyin)
大马吃饭。(simplified characters)
大馬吃飯。 (traditional characters)
big horse eats rice.
The big horse eats rice.
While the vast majority of Chinese speak the Mandarin dialect, it is worth noting that there are several other varieties of Chinese. These varieties are usually described as the Chinese 'dialects', but are often mutually unintelligible. For example, Cantonese speakers cannot understand Shanghainese speakers, and vice-versa. The varieties are described as dialects largely because of historical factors, and the presence of one written standard in the Chinese characters. To abandon Chinese characters in favour of pinyin would increase literacy considerably among many of China's poorest. On the other hand, it would remove the link between many of the mutually unintelligible dialects. Nevertheless, as the national media and official education system increasingly spread knowledge of spoken Mandarin among the speakers of other dialects, the likelihood of pinyin replacing Chinese characters can only grow.
Before the early 1900s, Chinese was written in a form known as Classical Chinese or wényán, which differed from all the modern Chinese dialects as much as Latin does from modern Italian, French and Spanish.
Classical Chinese was used as a writing system not in China, but also in Vietnam, Korea and Japan. In fact, modern Korean and Japanese both have a large percentage of their modern vocabulary directly borrowed from Classical Chinese.
Modern Vietnam no longer uses Chinese characters, and North Korea has kept their use to a minimum. South Korea however still requires students to memorise more than a thousand Chinese characters, and Japan utilises several thousand Chinese characters in its modern writing system.
From the early 1900s until the 1950s, a movement to modernise written Chinese developed, and in 1956, a form of modern Chinese, or baihua, was standardised and defined as the modern version of written Chinese for official purposes (Chen, 1999; 87).
Other dialects such as Cantonese and Shanghainese do not have a strong literary tradition, and are generally not written outside of informal contexts, such as comic strips. Generally, their speakers must read and write using Mandarin grammar and vocabulary.