As more people around the world start to study Mandarin, China's education ministry has revealed that much work still needs to be done teaching the language at home. It announced this month that 400m people, nearly a third of the population, are unable to communicate in Mandarin, and that many more cannot speak it well. That may seem a lot of people unable to speak their own national language but, as recently as 2007, nearly half China's citizens were unable to communicate effectively in what is known, in Mandarin, as putonghua ("common speech").
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