Answers
Feb 02, 2010 - 01:58 PM
Literally but with a possibility of adding confusion, zhong1wen1 means the language of the Middle Kingdom, a variable historical geographic region, the sphere of which I’ll not venture to define for it depends on time and other factors while han4yu3 suggests the language of the Han people, a Chinese ethnic group which, as you may know, constitutes the largest part of the population of China, above 90% of the total, and is the largest single ethnic group in the world. So Mandarin and Cantonese are both han4yu3 and zhong1wen. In the Mainland we use both zhong1wen1 and han4yu3 to refer to that particular field of study, that is, you can say both wo xue Zhongwen and wo xue Hanyu to mean that you are studying the Chinese language or the Chinese culture as a whole.