Chinese - The Sinitic Languages

This video is all about the Sinitic language family, also known as Chinese! Learn Chinese with ChineseClass101: http://bit.ly/Class101Chinese. (Full disclosure: if you sign up for a premium account, Langfocus receives a small referral fee. But if I didn't like it, I wouldn't recommend it!) Special thanks to Bing Chao and Liyang Ye for providing the Mandarin, Shanghainese, and Cantonese audio samples! Check out Langfocus on Patreon   / langfocus   Current Patreon members include these fantastic people: Brandon Gonzalez, Mark Thesing, Jiajun "Jeremy" Liu, Виктор Павлов, Guillermo Jimenez, Sidney Frattini Junior, Bennett Seacrist, Ruben Sanchez, Michael Cuomo, Eric Garland, Brian Michalowski, Sebastian Langshaw, Vadim Sobolev, Mohammed A. Abahussain, Fred, UlasYesil, JL Bumgarner, Rob Hoskins, Thomas A. McCloud, Ian Smith, Maurice Chow, Matthew Cockburn, Raymond Thomas, Simon Blanchet, Ryan Marquardt, Sky Vied, Romain Paulus, Panot, Erik Edelmann, Bennet, James Zavaleta, Ulrike Baumann, Ian Martyn, Justin Faist, Jeff Miller, Stephen Lawson, Howard Stratton, George Greene, Panthea Madjidi, Nicholas Gentry, Sergios Tsakatikas, Bruno Filippi, Sergio Tsakatikas, Qarion, Pedro Flores, Raymond Thomas, Marco Antonio Barcellos Junior, David Beitler, Rick Gerritzen, Sailcat, Mark Kemp, Éric Martin, Leo Barudi, Piotr Chmielowski, Suzanne Jacobs, Johann Goergen, Darren Rennels, Caio Fernandes, Iddo Berger, Peter Nikitin, and Brent Werner for their generous Patreon support. *  / langfocus     / langfocus     / langfocus   http://langfocus.com Music Introduction: "Lau Tzu Ehru" by Doug Maxwell Main: "Sao Meo" by Doug Maxwell Outro: "Cliff Slide" by Silent Partner. Some of my sources (I used many others too): http://web.mit.edu/jinzhang/www/pinyi... (Mandarin tones diagram) http://stedt.berkeley.edu/about-st "A History of the Chinese Language" by Hongyuan Dong 00:00 Intro 00:23 Basic information about the Chinese language(s) 01:50 The history of the Chinese language(s) 05:28 Varieties of Chinese today 06:34 The Chinese writing system 07:56 Chinese phonology 09:37 Variations in word order between varieties of Chinese 12:09 Traditional & Simplified characters 12:55 Final comments 13:36 The Question of the Day