Chinese Tatoos and the Chinese Language

Even though the Chinese culture is spreading quickly throughout the world through movies, the Internet and certain cultural derivative products such as tatoos of Chinese characters, there still seems to be a muddled understanding of certain basic concepts. It drives me nuts sometimes.

Yesterday I was at the movie theater and I noticed the popcorn seller's Chinese tatoo on the back of his forearm. I asked him to show it to me. It says "这是为家庭". "This is for family" is what it means, but grammatically the phrase is awkwardly written. (Luckily for him, it is not one of those nonsensical tatoos that says something like "ugly bloodsucking ghost" and the like!) Anyway, the guy said, no, it meant something else, and he said it was written in Mandarin Chinese.

I challenged him, saying that Mandarin is the spoken language, but the written language shown in his tatoo is called "simplied characters." He argued that the words are a dialect! Obviously he has mixed up the differences between the spoken Chinese and the written one--a common confusion among foreigners. Even though I tried to explain to him, he wouldn't accept the validity of my explanation. Instead, he bragged that the friend who has written this tatoo has lived in China for thirty-some years and in Sweden for only five years. Well, I was born in China and grew up in a Chinese-speaking environment myself, if only he knew. But it was useless to argue anymore at this point. The people waiting in the line were getting impatient.

Is it really that difficult to understand the differences between the spoken and written Chinese? Well, in that case, let me put it straight once and for all (LOL!):

The spoken language:
Official language in mainland China: Mandarin, or, Putonghua 普通话.
There are more than 100 spoken Chinese dialects, and as far as I know, there is no official count.
Mandarin is also commonly spoken in Taiwan and Singapore, while Cantonese is the common dialect in Hong Kong.

The written language:
There are two types of written characters in Chinese--traditional and simplified.
The traditional characters are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, while the simplified characters are used in mainland China and Singapore.
There is an increasing mix of the usage between Hong Kong and mainland China due to commercial and cultural exchanges in recent years.

I hope my explanation is clear. For your interest, here is a page about the history of tatoos in China and some very interesting links about the risks of getting Chinese tatoos without knowing the meaning of the words, including this one.