Mandarin is also a difficult language to learn, but is useful for anyone living in Singapore, as it is the second most spoken language, but this is in no ways a requirement for living in Singapore. There is also the secondary benefit of being better placed to speak with rest of the World's Mandarin speakers. The Mandarin writing system is a set of symbols of more than 40,000 characters and definitions. Here are some basic phrases in Mandarin, and their pronunciations in parenthesis.