The Chinese characters have a history of 5000 years. There are about 50,000 characters in writing Chinese, however, most people only know about 20,000 of these. Most of these characters have elements of meaning and information about pronunciation. The most widely use system of writing is Putonghua, which is used in all schools and almost all publications.
Chinese becomes various in different part of the country because of many regions in China. Among the seven varieties of Chinese, the standard language is Mandarin, which is widely used in Chinese dialects.
Only half of the Chinese can speak in standard and only 66 percent of people in the cities can speak Mandarin. But only 45percent of people in the countryside can use it. People need to know Mandarin as it will help people understand each other better.