TaiwanTaiwan,tw officially the Republic of China (ROC),tw is a country in East Asia. It is located at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northeast, and the Philippines to the south. The territories controlled by the ROC consist of 168 islands with a combined area of . The main island of Taiwan, also known as Formosa, has an area of , with mountain ranges dominating the eastern two-thirds and plains in the western third, where its highly urbanized population is concentrated.
Han ChineseThe Han Chinese or Han people are an East Asian ethnic group native to China. They are the world's largest ethnic group, making up about 18% of the global population. Han Chinese people comprise various subgroups speaking distinctive varieties of the Chinese languages. The estimated 1.4 billion Han Chinese people worldwide are primarily concentrated in the People's Republic of China (including Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau), where they make up about 92% of the total population.
PinyinHanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese. It is used in official contexts where Standard Chinese is an official language (Greater China and Singapore) as well as by the United Nations and in other international contexts. It is used principally to teach Mandarin, normally written with Chinese characters, to students already familiar with the Latin alphabet.
Chinese languageChinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language.
Hui peopleThe Hui people (, Xiao'erjing: خُوِزُو, Хуэйзў, Xuejzw) are an East Asian ethnoreligious group predominantly composed of Chinese-speaking adherents of Islam. They are distributed throughout China, mainly in the northwestern provinces and in the Zhongyuan region. According to the 2010 census, China is home to approximately 10.5 million Hui people. Outside China, the 110,000 Dungan people of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are also considered part of the Hui ethnicity. The Hui have a distinct connection with Islamic culture.
Chinese charactersChinese characters are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are graphic variants, were used historically and passed out of use, or are of a specialized nature.
CantoneseCantonese () is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese group, which has over 82.4 million native speakers. While the term Cantonese specifically refers to the prestige variety, it is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but partially mutually intelligible varieties like Taishanese.
BeijingBeijing (beɪˈdʒɪŋ ; ; AUDBeijing pronunciation.oggbei3.jing1), alternatively romanized as Peking (piːˈkɪŋ ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. With over 21 million residents, Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city as well as China's second largest city after Shanghai. It is located in Northern China, and is governed as a municipality under the direct administration of the State Council with 16 urban, suburban, and rural districts.
NanjingNanjing (naenˈdʒIN; , Mandarin pronunciation: AUDChinese-Nanjing.oggnan2.jing1), alternatively romanized as Nanking, is the capital of Jiangsu province of the People's Republic of China. It is a sub-provincial city, and a megacity. The city has 11 districts, an administrative area of , and a population of 9,423,400 .
SingaporeSingapore (ˈsɪŋ(g)əpɔːr), officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It is located about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bordering the Strait of Malacca to the west, the Singapore Strait to the south, the South China Sea to the east, and the Straits of Johor to the north.
Aspirated consonantIn phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages (including Indian ones) and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.
Tone (linguistics)Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme.
Inner MongoliaInner Mongolia, officially the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. Its border includes most of the length of China's border with the country of Mongolia. Inner Mongolia also accounts for a small section of China's border with Russia (Zabaykalsky Krai). Its capital is Hohhot; other major cities include Baotou, Chifeng, Tongliao, and Ordos. The autonomous region was established in 1947, incorporating the areas of the former Republic of China provinces of Suiyuan, Chahar, Rehe, Liaobei, and Xing'an, along with the northern parts of Gansu and Ningxia.
HebeiHebei UKˌhɜː'beɪ or h@'beɪ, UKˈhʌ'beɪ (; alternately Hopeh) is a northern province of China. Hebei is China's sixth most populous province, with over 75 million people. Shijiazhuang is the capital city. The province is 96% Han Chinese, 3% Manchu, 0.8% Hui, and 0.3% Mongol. Three Mandarin dialects are spoken: Jilu Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin and Jin. Hebei borders the provinces of Shanxi to the west, Henan to the south, Shandong to the southeast, Liaoning to the northeast, and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to the north.
VietnamVietnam (Việt Nam, vîət nāːm), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), is a country at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and a population of over 100 million, making it the world's fifteenth-most populous country. Vietnam shares land borders with China to the north, and Laos and Cambodia to the west. It shares maritime borders with Thailand through the Gulf of Thailand, and the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia through the South China Sea.
HunanHunan (UKhuː'næn, UShuː'nɑːn; ) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the South Central China region. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi to the east, Guangdong and Guangxi to the south, Guizhou to the west and Chongqing to the northwest. Its capital and largest city is Changsha, which also abuts the Xiang River. Hengyang, Zhuzhou, and Yueyang are among its most populous urban cities.
SichuanSichuan (sɪtʃˈwɑːn; , sɹ̩̂.ʈʂhwán; ; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the Sichuan Basin and the easternmost part of the Tibetan Plateau between the Jinsha River on the west, the Daba Mountains in the north and the Yungui Plateau to the south. Sichuan's capital city is Chengdu. The population of Sichuan stands at 83 million. Sichuan neighbors Qinghai to the northwest, Gansu to the north, Shaanxi to the northeast, Chongqing to the east, Guizhou to the southeast, Yunnan to the south, and the Tibet Autonomous Region to the west.
MacauMacau or Macao (məˈkaʊ, ; mɐˈkaw; , ōu.mǔːn), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a population of about 680,000 and an area of , it is the most densely populated region in the world. Formerly a Portuguese colony, the territory of Portuguese Macau was first leased to Portugal as a trading post by the Ming dynasty in 1557.
Spanish languageSpanish (español or idioma español) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with about 474.7 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries. It is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's fourth most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language.
YunnanYunnan (UKjuːˈnæn, USˌjuːˈnɑːn; ) is a landlocked province in southwestern China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the Chinese provinces of Guizhou, Sichuan, autonomous regions of Guangxi, and Tibet as well as Southeast Asian countries: Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. Yunnan is China's fourth least developed province based on disposable income per capita in 2014.
