Chloe is a student at the University of Birmingham, and is spending her year abroad studying at Beijing Language and Culture University. Here's her account of her Inner Mongolian adventure...

Why should you choose China for your year abroad?
A lecturer once told me: ‘Live in China for a week, and you could write a book. Live there for a month, you could write an essay. Live there a year and you can’t write anything at all!’ Perhaps I would not go as far as that, but my lecturer’s proclamation certainly illustrates the huge land of contrast and chaos that engulfs The Middle Kingdom.

• Beijing
• Shanghai

Fascinating Facts
1. There are 7 officially recognised spoken dialetcs (Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Min, Xiang, Hakka, Gan) and Chinese linguists also add Jin, Huizhou and Pingua.
2. Roughly 1/5 of the world speaks Chinese, making it the most widely-spoken language amongst native speakers.
3. The language itself makes a sharp distinction between its written and spoken forms.
4. Although there are a variety of spoken languages in Chinese, there is only one written form.
5. It is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several variations of the language. Typically in southern China, a person will be able to speak the official Putonghua, the local dialect, and occasionally either speak or understand another regional dialect, such as Cantonese.