Chinese languages

You were right to mention newscasters speaking correct Mandarin. Their are no "different" pronunciations of Mandarin, because it is a government defined dialect. Beijing has created a series of Mandarin tests and levels, the highest level needs to be achieved to become an announcer on the ...

This is really an impossible question to answer, you first have to define what "Chinese" is, then you have define "what a "dialect" is. Linguists have been arguing over these distinctions for years. They cannot even agree if Chinese is a single language or an inclusive group...

的has several different uses, the two main ones are possesives and adjectival markers as explained below. Hope it helps. 的（de) is used to show possesion. For example "This is my book." becomes “这是我的书 zhe shi wo de shu." This possesive form of "de" can be used with all nouns. ...

I remember reading that the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA estimates it takes at least 1320 hours of instruction to be moderately proficient in Chinese.

http://home.vtmuseum.org/terminology/pr ... _guide.php
http://www.pinyin.info/index.html

The above web pages are pretty good resources that should provide what you are looking for, good luck with the studies.