chinese in china mainland is called simplified chinese which was standardized in 1958 to make writing and communication easier, as you know, there are many languages and dialects in china, and the transitional chinese is very complex and slow for writing. for some political reasons, taiwan didn't follow the rule in 1958 and they still use the traditional chinese today. chs and cht have a few differences, the major one of which is the characters. that's why it is called traditional chinese. taiwanese has no pinyin, they uses 注音 which is also a classical method to indicate pronunciations. chs is used all over the world as an official chinese language while people in some regions use cht instead such as hongkong, taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and chinatowns in western countries. even though chs and cht have their own different phonetic symbol but most of words in formal pronounce and means the same except the writings.

Well, there are many dialects in China. Mandarine is the official language been promoted by the government. Some dialects are popular among certain regions. Taiwanese is close to Southern Fujian Dialect. A similar example is Cantonese is widely employed in Guangdong Province and Hong Kong.

Well... Mandarin is Chinese, but Chinese is not a language of Mandarin. For instance, Cantonese is one of Chinese. Chinese includes simplified character and traditional character two typefaces, like "门" and "門". They sounds "men" both. Just use in the different places. BUT Taiwanese and Chinese are not the same, such us their pronunciation. For example, "you" in Chinese sounds like "ni", but in Taiwanese it sounds like "li". Hope you can understand the difference between Chinese and Taiwanese. =)

Basically, a bunch of Chinese people left the mainland about 60 years ago to form another "country", and the language also changed as a result of the isolation. It's that simple.

1, traditional characters are used in Taiwan, and simplified characers in mainland China. such as: leaf, 叶 （simplified character), 葉 （traditional character) 2, a bit pinyin different, such as: garbage( pinyin in mainland is: la1 ji5; Taiwan: le4 se4) 3, use different character: travel ( 旅游 in mainland; 旅遊 in Taiwan) .......