Does the mandarin Chinese language have an alphabet? Why is it sometimes considered a dialect, does race depends on how easily you can learn it?
Chinese has symbols rather than letters – one character for each word in normal use. The basic set of symbols has about 7000 characters. Chinese is a tonal language, so the way in which a word is inflected is important in a way it is not in, for example, English. It is not race which makes it harder to learn Chinese – it is early upbringing. If you were not brought up with a tonal language from an early age, you lose or much reduce the ability to distinguish tones. So someone brought up speaking only western languages finds it much harder to learn a dialect of Chinese than someone brought up with another tonal language.
