Language
From ChinaTravelGuide
Over 20% of the world's population speaks Chinese. Standard Chinese, known as Mandarin or Putonghua (普通話), has about 47,035 characters according to Kangxi dictionary (康熙字典). However, most of them are rarely-used variants accumulated throughout history, and only found in historical writings. A full literacy of Chinese language requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters.
Mandarin is now spoken fluently by most people in Mainland China and in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, however, due to historical and linguistic reasons, the local Standard Cantonese is still very popular, but standard Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.
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Chinese Characters
Chinese characters first appeared in China about 3,200 years ago during the Shang Dynasty, and the symbols used are predominantly pictographs. Today, only about four percent of Chinese characters are derived directly from individual pictograms (象形字) (their meanings were expressed directly by the shapes). Most of the remaining 96% are pictophonetics (形声字) (about 82%), with logical aggregates (会意字) (13%), ideograph (指事字), associate transformation (转注字) and borrowing (假借字) making up the rest. Pictophonetics (形声字) are characters containing two parts where one indicates a general category of meaning and the other the sound, and logical aggregates (会意字) are characters combining pictograms to symbolize an abstract concept.
Many Chinese characters, especially traditional Chinese, take more than 20 strokes to write, are regarded as one of the most difficult written languages in the world.
Pinyin (拼音)
Pinyin is a transliteration system that expresses Chinese words in the 26-letter Latin alphabet of English. The primary purpose of pinyin is to for pronunciation. Mandarin is a tonal language, meaning that the same word can have several definitions depending on the intonation. Mandarin has four tones with each tone indicated by a diacritical mark above a non-medial vowel.
For example, the four tones for ma are
妈(mā) 麻(má) 马(mǎ) 骂(mà) 吗(•ma)
The words are "mother", "hemp", "horse", "admonish" and a question particle, respectively
Pinyin has also become a useful tool for entering Chinese language text into computers.
Dialects
Since ancient history, the Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects. Today, there are seven main groups, in order of population size are
- Mandarin (普通话) -- most area of China, except for the listed below.
- Wu (吴) -- Southern part of Jiangsu Province; Zhejiang Province; Shanghai
- Yue (粤) -- Guangdong Province; Southeast part of Guangxi Province
- Min (闽) -- Fujian Province; Taiwan Province; Guangdong Province (Chaozhou, Shantou), Hainan Province
- Xiang (湘) -- Hunan Province; northern part of Guangxi Province
- Hakka (客家) -- Eastern and northern part of Guangdong Province; Western part of Fujian Province; Southern part of Jiangxi Province; Taiwan Province
- Gan (赣) -- Jiangxi Province
Simplified Chinese (简体)
The first official list of simplified form characters appeared in 1956. It included 6500 simplified characters. Nowadays the simplified form characters are used in mainland China and in Singapore.
Traditional Chinese (繁体)
The traditional form characters are still use in Taiwan, in Hong Kong and in most of the overseas Chinese communities.
The Chinese computerized fonts for words processor include 6500 characters for the simplified form and 13500 for the traditional form.
Chinese words of foreign origin
Chinese language has adopted many foreign words. The following are just some examples.
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Popular Chinese Phrases
Want to learn to speak some Chinese? No problem. Try the Chinese Phrase Book for the most popular words and populars.
