Just curious–it is a color option on the Galaxy S10.
(And yes, I know that there is more than one dialect of “Chinese.”)
Does it give a color preview (i.e., white, cream, etc.?) I’m guessing it is some shade of white from the “bai” part, but if there is a color preview that would be a big hint.
Without the tone marks, it could be a lot of things, but based on the very light blue example on that page, I’m going to guess 雨雨白， i.e. “rain white.”
Also, this comes up a lot, but it’s not really true for China. Yes, there are a bunch of dialects, but the government only recognizes one of them as “Chinese” – the standardized Mandarin that’s been taught in the schools (often alongside a local dialect) since the late 1950’s. The Chinese languages tests (actually called “Chinese Language” in English) all test Mandarin, effectively any “Chinese” class you take is going to teach Mandarin, and the number of speakers of Mandarin absolutely dwarfs that of all the other dialects put together.
Outside of China, but still in the Chinese-speaking world, the numbers aren’t so one-sided, but Mandarin is still your best bet if someone tells you they speak “Chinese.” But be careful of calling them “dialects” – there’s considerable (and often heated) argument among their speakers as to whether the “other” Chinese tongues are “dialects” or “languages” in their own right. (Curiostity: They all share a common written language, even though they’re not mutually intelligible in their spoken form!)
There’s also some racial controversy, as Mandarin is based on “Han Language”, Han being the dominant ethnicity among China’s ruling class (and people, in most areas), and many other ethnicities feel it’s an attempt to subdue their own language/dialect–but learn it anyway.
Speakers of Cantonese supposedly resided in/near the main port cities, and therefore were the main points of contact with the outside world (and some of the first expats), so outside of China they’re better represented (as a percentage of speakers) than within. I hear a lot of Cantonese spoken around here, for example, although in effectively every case the speaker can switch to Mandarin if necessary (and usually English).
There is (was?) a written “Literary Chinese”, which was supposed to be a sort of common denominator (based on the classics), even beyond China itself. The movement towards a common literary standard was also accelerated under the Qin and Han; I don’t know how controversial that makes it.
Outside of China, I’ve never had anyone tell me that they speak “Chinese”, and it’s only in the last 10 years that I’ve seen the word occasionally used by people who understand what they are talking about. Never by Chinese people (except at the United Nations). Even text is usually “Simplified Chinese” or “Traditional Chinese”
That’s an odd claim. It’s a perfectly colloquial thing to say - in either English or Chinese (中文).
Huh? “You speak Chinese very well” is usually the first thing out of a Chinese person’s mouth if a non-Chinese person speaks to them in Chinese (however poorly).
I must be misunderstanding what you are talking about?
And this is a complete non-sequitur: Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese aren’t different languages, they’re just different character “glyphs” for some of the characters. And the distinction is entirely orthogonal to dialect; you can represent any dialect in either system.
In the context of this thread, what the OP said is perfectly cromulent. It doesn’t matter that the Chinese government has standardized on mandarin, there are multiple dialects of Chinese and many are different enough from mandarin to essentially be different languages. So what the OP said was accurate, and although most of us would assume mandarin, keeping pedants at bay is always a good idea.
As for the thing about number of speakers, many people in China speak mandarin as their second language. There are a vast number of people who day to day use another language/dialect as first choice.
Not quite grokking this. “Chinese” is the most common thing I hear, followed by “Mandarin”.
I think I’m missing something in your post…
My Taiwanese wife has never heard of that color.
You understood me correctly: I’ve never heard that out of a Chinese person’s mouth. Certainly it’s not something my wife, my wife’s family, or my co-workers would say.
At the risk of being obvious 
Perhaps you missed the critical word “text” in my posting? The bit where I was mentioning “text”? The bit where, after having made an observation about Chinese languages, I moved onto to making an observation about “Chinese” text?
Then your experience is entirely different from mine. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard any of my dozens of Chinese coworkers refer to their language (Mandarin) as anything OTHER than “Chinese,” except for the one who speaks Cantonese, and who words it as: “I usually speak Cantonese instead of Chinese.”
The reason I brought it up in the first place is that this whole “there’s no such language as Chinese” thing has become the modern “decimate means to reduce by exactly a 1/10th.” Yeah, it may be strictly accurate, but literally nobody is going to misunderstand what you man when you say “Chinese”, and as I say, I’ve never met a Mandarin speaker who doesn’t refer to their language as “Chinese” except under the most pedantic of circumstances or to explicitly differentiate it from some dialect.
Yeah, I’m guessing it’s made up, like “Bandi Blue.” For example, the displayed color is similar to the color “White rain” in the Benjamin Moore collection (White Rain 708 | Benjamin Moore) and a google search in English for “rain white” or “white rain” returns similar color swatches.
I’ve heard of “Yabai! Yabai!”
But that’s Japanese.
When I was trying to learn Mandarin they taught us to refer to it some way that I forget, but people looked at me funny when I used it. I finally asked someone the right way to say I speak a little Mandarin, and they told me to just say “I speak a little” (wo hue shuo?). The rest is obvious.
A story: One time a family from China came onto my shop. The grandfather sat down while the rest looked around so I decided to use my best Mandarin on him and asked how he was doing. There was no response, and I was really embarrassed. Were they not from China? Was my Mandarin that bad? Finally I heard a loud voice from the back of the store. His son said: “he’s deaf”.
FWIW, I too am puzzled by this statement, as a Chinese American who grew up speaking Chinese at home (of parents who fled Communists for Taiwan before coming to the USA), and had Chinese language school lessons on weekends, I can’t really even think of what else would be said. Maybe it’s a difference in subculture or community. Is your username indicating you’re in Australia?
In English it’s “Chinese” and in (Mandarin) Chinese it’s almost always just called “zhongwen”, even for the spoken language. More formally (the mainland Chinese term I learned later is “common” or “everyday speech”), if disturbing from a “dialect” like Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Shanghaiese (which my parents also spoke); or possibly “the language of the Han people”, I term I first heard in speaking to non-ethnic-Han from China (not someone I encountered until college).
Anybody I’ve ever chatted with in Chinese who then asked if my children spoke any Chinese (and this is not a countable number at this point as they’re all in or nearing college agenow), would definitely be asking,
Which apparently is exactly what Google Translate gives, too
Similar. I’ve lived in Taiwan now for six years and have been married to my Taiwanese wife for 13. I’ve talked to god knows how many native Chinese speakers, native Japanese speakers and native English speakers; and the vast majority of the time, people say “Chinese” unless specifically differentiating between Mandarin and Cantonese or dialects local to Taiwan.
Context is highly critical. Essentially everyone that I speak to in person knows that Mandarin is spoken in Taiwan, so the importance is differentiating between speaking or not speaking the language used here.
When I tell people that I’m studying Chinese then it’s a very safe bet that I’m learning Mandarin. Likewise, questions concerning if a foreigner speaks the language or not will automatically come with that assumption.
I assume it’s more important to make the distinction clear from the beginning in contexts where there is a higher mixture of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. Melbourne’s statement concerning the frequency of distinguishing between the two sets of characters also suggests this, as Cantonese speakers will know traditional characters where Mandarin speakers (outside of Taiwan) will use the simplified set.