Basics

There are several dialects of Chinese spoken around the world, but there is only one, universal WRITTEN language which is understood by everyone (who can read.)

It should be made clear for those who wish to study Chinese in Taiwan that the version of written Mandarin Chinese characters used here is different from that used in mainland China. In Taiwan, the 'traditional' or 'complex characters' are used, where as on mainland China they have recently created (in the last 15 years) an almost completely different 'simplified' character set.

Although the 'simplified' characters can be read by most Taiwanese and others who are familiar with the 'traditional' characters, the 'traditional' characters cannot be read by those on the mainland. The 'Simplified' characters have less 'strokes' or lines which are used to create the written characters, while the 'traditional' characters may be composed of over 30 strokes for just one character! 

The major difference between Chinese and English is the use of thousands of characters instead of a phonetic alphabet. Although Zhuyin/'Bopomofo' and 'Hanyu Pinyin' are fairly recently created 'alphabet-like' systems of learning characters/spoken Chinese in the Chinese world, but even these systems vary in Chinese speaking countries and contain their own respective difficulties further complicating everything. (see Transliteration/Romanization - 'Pinyin, Bopomofo')

With an English alphabet, the combination of letters creates different words and meanings. With Chinese, because there is no alphabet, a person must memorize the strokes for each and every character as well as the sound. This is why a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong can read and understand the same characters as a Taiwanese in Taipei even if they pronounce the character in a completely different dialect (Cantonese, Taiwanese, etc...) The characters and the spoken language can be learned completely independently of one another!

Written Chinese characters are based on ideograms, or 'idea-pictures', which graphically represent ideas and objects using written characters derived directly from actual diagrams of the subject. Chinese scholars claim there are over 50,000 characters in existence, but in reality many of these are variations of one another and have fallen into disuse over the centuries or are outdated or are used for specialized fields of learning. Approximately 5,000 characters are currently in use and only about 2,000 are very common and considered the minimum neccessary in order to read a newspaper. Few scholars are able to remember more than 6,000 characters without referring to a dictionary. Also, about 2,000 characters are borrowed by the Korean and Japanese written languages.

The origin of this method/system seems to date back to oracle bones excavated over the last 100 years in China which date back to the ancient Shang dynasty (1766-1123 BC). Philosophical questions and other matters which were important to the emperor were inscribed on dried tortoise shells which were heated to the point of cracking. Mystics/diviners would 'read' the cracks and interpret answers from the Heavens, which they would then inscribe on the shells and store in the imperial archives.

Historians have analyzed the number and intricacies of the characters written on the shells and determined that the Chinese written language was invented during the reign of the Yellow Emperor around 2700 BC. The characters coontinued to evolve and grow for another 2700 years, but have remained virtually the same for about the past 2,000 years (since the Han dynasty), making Chinese the oldest continuing writing system in the world.

Due to it's non-phonetic nature it was able to serve as a unifying language for the dozens of Chinese ethnic groups with different dialects (as long as they learned the written symbols) spread out over a huge land area. In addition