If it helps, you would say : "I am a teochew person" by saying: "wo xi dio chu nang" if you spoke teochew "wo shi chao zhou ren" if you spoke mandarin although the written language is the same, you'd be surprised at how different the dialects sound. i can still understand hokkien , which is very similar to teochew. but cantonese is almost like another foreign language to me. what i also find interesting is that Singaporeans and Malaysians speak mandarin with SLIGHTLY different accents, even though the countries are just next to each other. (and both are very small) Singaporeans and Malaysians can tell each other apart, just by the way they speak mandarin. YES. All Chinese children learn Mandarin in school here. (If you are not Chinese you learn another second language). Simplified Chinese characters are used here. wrt to someone else's question: Simplified chinese characters are more widely used in: China Singapore Traditional chinese characters : in HK Taiwan I think Malaysia uses a mixture