Mandarin

Today I read a blog about Mandarin Chinese and different dialects of it. To be honest I don't know much about Chinese, I guess I wrongly assumed that Chinese was mutually intelligible by speakers but with a language with a population so large that is a dumb assumption to make. 

This blog explains about the grammatical differences in native speakers of Mandarin Chinese versus speakers of other dialects like Cantonese. There are also variations of Jianghuai Mandarin and Southwest Mandarin. What was especially crazy was this blog saying that there are over 900 million Native Mandarin speakers. Those are just the native speakers! Thats almost 1 billion people, and honestly I think that language should be taught in schools since so many people speak it. It would help us connect with each other. The eight subgroups of Chinese are, "Northeast 东北, Beijing 北京, Jilu 冀鲁, Jiaoliao 胶辽, Central Plains 中原, Lanyin 兰银, Jianghuai 江淮, and Southwest 西南" according to this blog. 

https://unravellingmag.com/articles/mandarin-dialects-unity-in-diversity/