Mandarin:  

Mandarin is the standard language spoken in China.  Every area of the country has it’s own dialect but the way that someone from the North for example can speak to someone in the South is by the use of a single language that everybody understands.  That language is Mandarin.  Mandarin lessons will be on offer for students wishing to include some language study during their stay.

Mandarin Chinese is known as one of, if not the, most difficult languages to learn due to its high reliance on varying tones of speech and its necessary integration with the written character.  The Chinese language sound base is very low compared to say the English language which has a much higher amount of sounds with which to make words.  In order for the Chinese language to have enough different sounds to make it work we find that there are 5 tones used and that often the same sound is used for lots of different words. This means that frequently the only way to tell the difference between words is either in the context of the sentence or by referring to the written character. 

The tones mentioned are a high flat sound, a rising sound, and down then up sound, a falling sound and no tone variance to the sound.  These differences make learning the language a challenging but fascinating side aspect to the overall study of the culture.