Mandarin本来是满语的意思，由于满族统治中国后放弃了满语，改说汉语官话，所以汉语官话也就成了Mandarin，汉语官话形成了现在的普通话，所以英语把普通话也叫做Mandarin。 Mandarin was the language of Man People in the begining, after Man People controlled the whole China, they gave up Mandarin and began to speak 汉语官话，so 汉语官话 became Mandarin，then 汉语官话 becomes 普通话， therefore 普通话 is also called Mandarin by English speaker.汉语官话（han4yu2guan1hua4）：Chinese Official Language. 普通话(pu3tong1hua4)：general Chinese language

pǔ普tōng通huà话

Mandarin is the official language of modern China. It is built on the basis of the northern dialect, which has a mature grammar and spelling rules.Mandarin is composed of Chinese characters, but also has the pinyin.Pinyin can help us to read a word, it has four tones, for example: ā á ǎ à ō ó ǒ ò ē é ě è ī í ǐ ì if you learned the basis of the phonetic alphabet and tone, you can read mandarin. Therefore, learning pinyin is the basis of learning mandarin. After that you should learn Chinese characters and grammar. Hope this will help you.

You can just regard Mandarin asa kind of Chinese accent, It's easy to understand this way,for example some people who come from different places speak English in different accents, Mandarin is used as Chinese official language. Hope I can help you.

清朝从一六几几年才开始，而mandarin这个词韦氏词典给出的时间是1589年已经使用，而且最早来自梵语。因此，说是最早指满族话可能根据不足。 mandarin作为名词可以指：九品中的官员：任一中国古代帝国高级官员的九品官阶中的成员 而Mandarin Chinese才是“中国官话”的意思，现在只用mandarin应该是一种省略用法吧。而“普通话”这个词应该才几十年的历史吧，因为民国时的叫法应该叫“国语”。