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I'm just reading a book about China and Chinese customs from Heike Barai. She says that Chinese only has around 300 different syllables, whereas modern German has about 10 000 and I suppose English is about the same.
Does Chinese really only have 300 syllables?
I took the CEDICT file and wrote a script on it. The file has 113k dictionary entries, so it covers a very large portion of the Chinese vocabulary.
There are 1522 different pinyin syllables in CEDICT, when you distinguish tone numbers (like, ma1, ma2, ma3, ma4, ma).
If you do not care about tone numbers, you'll get 413 syllables (ma, mo, mi, etc.)
These results include m2 and m4 (呒, 呣 [interjections]).
UPDATE: Of course, you can argue whether 'ging' and 'fiao' are Mandarin pinyin syllables or not, but they are in the CEDICT file and my answered is based on that.
As Maroon points out in a comment, you have to say which dialect you are asking about. This answer is for Standard Chinese, aka Mandarin.
It also depends on what sort of stuff you include. Counting the distinct lines in the syllable index of the Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary, I get 420 "lines" but this includes some very marginal stuff such as tei, kei, den, etc. This does not include any of the rhotacized syllables, where a suffix -er merges with the syllables and produces many distinctive syllables.
Most important, however, this figure ignores the four lexical tones of Mandarin, which is definitely not the right; tones are distinctive in Mandarin, so syllables with different tones are different syllables. The distribution of tones and syllables is skewed, however; not every syllable has all four tones. A rough approximation is about 1200 distinct syllables. Again, there will be many marginal cases.
All this does not use any sort of phonemic analysis which could perhaps reduce the number of syllables, depending on what phonological theories or notation you adopt.
So Chinese is not so syllable poor as you might expect. Japanese and Hawaiian, for example, have far fewer distinct syllables than Mandarin.
The answer to this could well depend on the specific language meant by "Chinese". For instance, Cantonese supposedly has over 600, which isn't surprising because of larger variation of vowels and the presence of more ending consonants. (I am unsure as to whether this figure takes tones into account.) I will assume that this is about 普通话, since that seems to be generally taken as a default.
普通话 is easier to assess, because pinyin charts with all possible pinyin combinations are easily available, and generally a syllable simply corresponds to a distinct combination pinyin. (I am not sure if different tones count as distinct syllable combinations -- the estimates would appear to be really off if they were, so I am not going to take those into account.) Thus, I copied this table into Microsoft Excel and deleted all syllables that were either duplicated or that do not, in my memory (from formal Mandarin lessons), appear in 普通话, with some cross-checking by typing pinyin combinations I was suspicious about into this online dictionary.
The result I'm currently getting is 408. This is slightly higher than the number your book reports, but in line with Wikipedia's. So 300, at least for Mandarin (which would make the most sense as an object of discussion), is probably a slight underestimate, particularly if the writer is thinking of something towards the lower end of the 300's.
