[KMag]

> Maybe a specific Chinese dialect will be more regular than the bigger picture of the whole language.

Standard written Chinese is based on the grammar of spoken Mandarin. If someone mentions a Chinese dictionary without mentioning a particular dialect, they're almost certainly referring to Standard Written Chinese (essentially Mandarin).

Also, Chinese is less a single language than the Romance languages are a single language. The more far-flung dialects share less in common than, say Italian and Spanish. If Portugal were a province of Spain, Portuguese would probably be considered a dialect of Spanish. As my Linguistics professor used to say, "A language is a dialect with an army." One rarely deals with "the whole Chinese language", if by that you mean the union of all of the dialects. That would be like dealing simultaneously with Romanian, Portuguese, Romansh, French, Italian and Spanish as a single entity.