Chinese Dialects

Im just doing another one since I didn't see the chinese dialects on anyone elses blogs.

The most spoken Chinese dialects are Mandarin, Wu, and Cantonese, although many Chinese speakers see "Standard Mandarin" as "the Chinese language", and everything else as just dialects.  All of the different dialects share a common history and a common written language.  The differences between Chinese dialects are as great as the differences between Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.). Like Romance languages, the modern dialects all descended from a common proto-language (in this case, the Romance languages descended from Latin). Unlike Romance languages, the speakers remained a united nation throughout their history instead of fighting with each other and dividing up along linguistic borders.

Joy Luck Club #1

Mahjong is a game that came from China, commonly played by four players. Its a game of skill, strategy and calculation and some chance. In Asia, mahjong is also played as a gambling game and is commonly played for fun.  The game is played with 152 tiles with Chinese characters and symbols on them, although some variations use a different number of tiles. Each player receives thirteen tiles and players draw and discard tiles until they complete a legal hand using the fourteenth drawn tile to form four groups and a pair.  There are many variations in the rules and the scoring system, and the minimum hand needed to win changes based on the rules being used.