This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese


00:01:20 1 Names
00:02:43 1.1 Putonghua and Guoyu
00:05:05 1.2 Huayu
00:06:02 1.3 Hanyu
00:06:45 1.4 Mandarin
00:07:40 2 History
00:09:05 2.1 Late empire
00:11:20 2.2 Modern China
00:16:11 3 Current role
00:22:34 3.1 Standard Chinese and the educational system
00:25:12 4 Phonology
00:27:07 4.1 Regional accents
00:29:06 5 Grammar
00:31:14 6 Vocabulary
00:32:58 7 Writing system
00:35:09 8 Examples
00:35:19 9 See also



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Speaking Rate: 0.9863055338252307
Voice name: en-US-Wavenet-B


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- Socrates


SUMMARY
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Standard Chinese, also known as Modern Standard Mandarin, Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese (MSMC), or simply Mandarin, is a standard variety of Chinese that is the sole official language of China, the de facto official language of Taiwan and also one of the four official languages of Singapore. Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, and its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese.
Like other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is a tonal language with topic-prominent organization and subject–verb–object word order. It has more initial consonants but fewer vowels, final consonants and tones than southern varieties. Standard Chinese is an analytic language, though with many compound words.
There are two standardised forms of the language, namely Putonghua in Mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan. Aside from a number of differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Putonghua is written using simplified Chinese characters (plus Hanyu Pinyin romanization for teaching), and Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters (plus Zhuyin for teaching). Many characters are identical between the two systems.