Many regions - especially in the southeast of the country - also have their own "dialect". These are really distinct languages, as different as French and Italian although referring to Chinese "dialects" as separate languages is a touchy political issue. Of true dialects within Mandarin, pronunciation varies widely and there is often a liberal dose of local slang or terminology to liven up the mix. The largest dialect groups are Cantonese, spoken in Guangdong (Canton) and Hong Kong, Wu (Shanghainese), spoken in the region around Shanghai, and Minnan (Hokkien, Teochew), spoken in the region around Xiamen. Many Chinese are bilingual in the local language and Mandarin. A few who are older, less educated or from the countryside may speak only the local dialect, but this is unlikely to affect tourists. It often helps to have a guide that can speak the local language as it marks that person as an insider, and you as a friend of the insider. As a general rule, almost all Chinese can understand spoken Mandarin even if they are unable to reply except in their local dialect.

Whatever the spoken dialect, the written language is always the same. Even Japanese and Korean use many of the same characters with the same meaning. There is a complication in this, however. Mainland China uses "simplified characters", adopted to facilitate literacy education some years back. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and by many overseas Chinese, but also on the mainland in advertising and commercial signs. As a result you will just as often see ?? (yínháng) as ?? for "bank". The simplification was however fairly systematic, which means that all hope is not lost for the traveller trying to pick up some sign-reading skills.

In the far western reaches of the country, Turkic languages such as Uighur, Kirghiz and Kazakh are spoken by some of the non-Han ethnic minorities. In tourist areas however, Mandarin or English will likely be usable.

English speakers

Although most Chinese are taught some English at school, and passing an English exam is a requirement for a university degree, the focus of the instruction is formal grammar and writing rather than conversation. As a result, few learn it well enough to be able to participate in an English conversation. Outside of the largest cities and the major tourist areas, it is quite rare to find locals who speak decent English.
That said, a few locals who have studied English to university level (especially if abroad) generally have a reasonable to very good standard of English.
Useful hint: it's often helpful if you try to simplify your English. Stay away from using complex phrasing like "Would you mind if I come back tomorrow?" and stick to simpler, more abrupt phrasing like "I will come back tomorrow."

Learning Chinese

In the West, Chinese has an undeserved reputation as being exceptionally difficult to learn. While it is very different from English or other Western languages, there is no reason that a traveller can not learn a bit of Chinese; every bit you learn will be of enormous help. The main difficulty with learning to speak Chinese is the pronunciation; basic grammar is very simple.

Written Chinese is famously complex, however there is the advantage of it being easier to learn a bit of. In alphabetic writing systems, you can't understand anything until you know the whole alphabet and speak a good deal of the language. In Chinese on the other hand it's very straightforward to pick up the characters, for example for "Internet Cafe" or "Fried Noodles", without knowing anything else about the language. If you have a good visual memory, you may even end up knowing what a sign means, without being able to pronounce it out loud — still a useful skill even if only to distinguish, say, the exit ?? from the entrance ??. To bridge the gap between recognizing and reading out loud, pinyin was developed, which uses latin script to help teach Chinese to schoolchildren and foreigners. It is not obvious, as letters and combinations are not what you would expect, but learning it at even a basic level already has enormous practical value for the traveller.

• You are advised not to travel by bus in the rainy day or at night because there are many mountain roads and the roads condition is not so good and safe.