Chinese - The Sinitic Languages

This video is all about the Sinitic language family, also known as Chinese!
Learn Chinese with ChineseClass101: http://bit.ly/Class101Chinese.

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Special thanks to Bing Chao and Liyang Ye for providing the Mandarin, Shanghainese, and Cantonese audio samples!

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Music

Introduction: "Lau Tzu Ehru" by Doug Maxwell
Main: "Sao Meo" by Doug Maxwell
Outro: "Cliff Slide" by Silent Partner.

Some of my sources (I used many others too):

http://web.mit.edu/jinzhang/www/pinyin/tones/ (Mandarin tones diagram)
http://stedt.berkeley.edu/about-st
"A History of the Chinese Language" by Hongyuan Dong

00:00 Intro
00:23 Basic information about the Chinese language(s)
01:50 The history of the Chinese language(s)
05:28 Varieties of Chinese today
06:34 The Chinese writing system
07:56 Chinese phonology
09:37 Variations in word order between varieties of Chinese
12:09 Traditional & Simplified characters
12:55 Final comments
13:36 The Question of the Day