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Zhang
Moderator
12 Posts |
 Posted - 03/22/2007 : 01:13:16
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Introduction
Chinese language is one of humanity's greatest and most enduring cultural achievements. Archeological research indicates that possible precursors of Chinese characters appeared as early as 8,000 years ago and that Chinese characters formed a complete system of writing by about 3,500 years ago. Among the writing systems in use at that time, only Chinese characters are still used. Further more, until recent centuries, China had one of the highest literacy rates in the world and more than half of the world's literature was written in Chinese characters.
Chinese Demystified
The notion of Chinese is quite confusing. From a linguistic point of view, the term of Chinese covers a group of languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, among others. They are, to a great extent, mutually unintelligible, perhaps more so than Italian and French. In addition to phonological differences, they have also some lexical and grammatical variations. However, because there has long been a single method for writing Chinese, and a common literary and cultural history, a tradition has grown up of referring to those varieties of speech in China as dialects. The main dialect spoken in mainland China and Taiwan is Mandarin. In fact, there are more people on Earth who speak Mandarin than speakers of English. Cantonese is widely spoken in Hong Kong and in many overseas Chinese communities.
There are two sets Chinese characters in use. One is called Simplified Characters, which is used in mainland China and Singapore. The other is called Traditional Characters, which is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and most other Chinese speaking communities.
Chinese Characters
Chinese is written in characters. How many characters are there? An educated person can probably recognize more than 6,000 characters while the most common computer encoding system in Taiwan and Hong Kong incorporates about 13,000 characters, and the standard system in China incorporates about 6,500 characters. However, since Chinese words are generally composed of two characters, only a few thousand characters can be used to understand many tens or even hundreds of thousands of words. Thus, knowledge of 2 or 3 thousand is good enough for everyday use of communication in Chinese.
Chinese characters are written in strokes such as dots, horizontal and vertical lines, etc, and the number of strokes in a given character can vary from one to over thirty. It is often said that every Chinese character is a picture, but only a couple hundred are actual Pictographs. The other 3 basic types of Chinese characters are: Ideographs, Logical Aggregates and Phonetic Complexes.
Chinese characters are often criticised for being overly complex relative to other writing systems. One reason for the added complexity is the different information content of the characters. Roman letters give relatively precise information on pronunciation, but less information on meaning. In contrast, Chinese characters give less precise (and sometimes no) pronunciation information, but do give information on meaning.
However, learning Chinese characters is not as difficult as one would think. Firstly, because the majority of Chinese characters are Phonetic Complexes, learning to pronounce them is not so difficult. Secondly, because all characters are derived from a couple hundred simple pictographs and ideographs in ways that are usually quite logical and easy to remember, learning to recognise and write them is not that hard too.
Chinese Words
Most Chinese charaters are words by themselves with a few exceptions. While most characters are words, most Chinese words are not just a single character, but rather are composed of at least two characters. Chinese has many hundreds of thousands of words, most of which are created by combining just a few thousand characters. Multiple-character words are created by several methods. A typical one is that the two or more characters composing a word might each contribut |
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Stefan
Moderator
243 Posts |
Posted - 03/22/2007 : 01:19:15
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Hi,
very interesting to know. What is the easiest way to learn chinese? Do you start learning chinese characters or what is the best approach in learning this language?
I also heard that even with china are a lot of different dialects, does this mean that even chinese dont understand each other sometimes?
Thx. |
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Zhang
Moderator
12 Posts |
Posted - 03/22/2007 : 02:05:39
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Hi Stefan
Thanks for reading,by the way, china really has more dialects as Cantonese, according to statistics, there are close 80 kinds of dialects and 30 kinds of written language in china,but almost all Chinese can speak Mandarin,especially young people.
In my view,if you want to learn chinese systematically,please go to language school,that is easiest way :)
Nice to meet you here.
All the best.
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Stefan
Moderator
243 Posts |
Posted - 03/22/2007 : 03:26:33
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Hi Zhang,
thanks for letting me know:-)
How long do you usually have to learn chinese before you can speak with chinese (and they understand what you are actually trying to tell them)???
Nice to talk to you. |
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Zhang
Moderator
12 Posts |
Posted - 03/23/2007 : 00:53:44
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Hi friends
Tere is a web site about chinese language,i hope it is useful for you. http://www.hanyu.com.cn
Best regards:)
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Stefan
Moderator
243 Posts |
Posted - 03/25/2007 : 05:44:54
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| interesting...thank you. |
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Zhang
Moderator
12 Posts |
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Stefan
Moderator
243 Posts |
Posted - 03/27/2007 : 06:30:43
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| Thx, very interesting. I have started today my first chinese lesson;-) and I still love it, but seems to be a long way to go...hehe |
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lytrans
Starting Member
2 Posts |
Posted - 03/28/2007 : 02:31:06
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I am from China. There are many dialects in China, that is to say, in most of cities,the people(especially the older one) likes to say dialects, and during daily dialogue, they say dialects, and if in work, in the office, they mostly say the standard chinese language.
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Chet0012
Administrator
19 Posts |
Posted - 03/28/2007 : 05:51:52
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Dear lytrans,
What is considered to be the "standard chinese language"? Is it Mandarin? Cantonese?
I am curious as to what would be a best option for a dialect to learn.
Thanks!
Working hard to take the lead in online language websites! |
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lytrans
Starting Member
2 Posts |
Posted - 03/29/2007 : 02:01:13
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quote:
[i]Originally posted by Chet0012[/i]
[br]Dear lytrans,
What is considered to be the "standard chinese language"? Is it Mandarin? Cantonese?
I am curious as to what would be a best option for a dialect to learn.
Thanks!
Working hard to take the lead in online language websites!
Mandarin is the standard Language.
dialect needn't to learn. Even as I lived in Nanjing, I cann't speak most of the dialect of Nanjing.
---------------------
Super A Translation (Nanjing, China) Co., Ltd.
welcome the professional translators join our team.
EMAIL: lhx0812@hotmail.com |
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Chet0012
Administrator
19 Posts |
Posted - 03/29/2007 : 05:23:59
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Thank you lytrans.
I am hoping to start learning the language in the next few months. Probably by some books and audio-tapes. I am sure I will have many questions as I go!
Working hard to take the lead in online language websites! |
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Stefan
Moderator
243 Posts |
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Learn Chinese Language
