Cultural tips

Hanzi, Chinese dialects
Hanzi (Chinese character) is the one used by the most people, and has the longest history. From the earliest batches of documents written in characters we can see that Hanzi has a history of at least 3,000 years, counting from oracle bone script in Shang Dynasty. Oracle bone script is not only pictograms but also shows the pronunciation. Up to now there are still some vivid pictographs looking like pictures.

At present Hanzi is generally divided into the complicated Chinese and the simplified Chinese. The former one is used among the foreign citizens of Chinese origin in the Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and North America; while the latter is used among the Chinese in the Chinese mainland, Malaysia, Singapore, and Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, although there are some differences in the writing system, the individual differences of the commonly used characters are less than 25 percent.
Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. There've always been some dialects. It's generally divided into seven main Chinese dialects, which are Northern Dialects, Wuyu, Xiangyu, Ganyu, Kakka (dialect), Cantonese and Minyu. Among them the Northern Dialects is also called mandarin. Speakers include over 70% of the Han population. The rest are spoken in southern China. Although people speaking different dialects could not understand each other, Hanzi they use is the same.

Requirements and Thanks

In Chinese there're several fixed sayings used to express thanks and apology. When requiring for helps, usually, one would use the saying like "Excuse me...", and "Please". If just a piece of cake, such as, borrowing a pencil, asking the way, passing on message, and receiving the phone etc. Chinese people is not usually so polite this way, let alone, between the relatives and good friends. Chinese people believe that the other has known their feelings of thanks, therefore, they need not to say more. After hearing "Thanks", the common answer is "Nothing" or "You're welcome".
When expressing the feeling of requiring or interrupting the others, people often use "láo jià" in Chinese; when asking to be given the way, people usually express by "jiè guò" or "qǐng ràng yí xià" in Chinese; and when asking about something, the "qǐng wèn" is commonly put in front.