Ni hao! According to Ethnologue, Chinese (and all of its varieties such as Mandarin and Wu) is by far the most spoken language across the world with 1.31 billion speakers. That’s approximately 16 percent of the world’s population. Some interesting facts about Chinese are: there is no alphabet; nouns do not have a singular/plural distinction; there are over 20,000 distinct Chinese characters; the Chinese writing system is over 3,000 years old and the word ‘Mandarin’ comes from Sanskrit. 

International Chinese Language Day is celebrated on 20th April each year. Here is a short video with 10 Chinese words that are used in everyday English made by the BISP Modern Languages Department: