An Introduction to Learning Chinese
Posted on April 17, 2009
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The Chinese language has over 40,000 characters, but only 10,000 are commonly used. To fully understand the language (at least in reading and writing), you need learning Chinese Characters. Chinese is considered as one of the most beautiful but complex languages in the world. There are more than one billion people that live in China, not including overseas Chinese, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and parts of Malaysia, it makes Chinese as the most spoken language in the world. More and more schools are offering Chinese language programs as the economic prosperity of these areas are growing.
Chinese is a very diversified language, with twelve different dialects of spoken Chinese. The national dialect of China is Mandarin, or “pu3 tong1 hua4″ which translates into “the people’s language” I would recommend learning Chinese to many people, with over 50% of China’s population able to speak Mandarin. The language is based on ideaograms, or based strongly on symbols and characters. Loosely it is based on “Chinese radicals” which are combinations of 214 elementary pictographs.”
The Chinese language is one of the oldest languages in the world. Factually, the earliest traces of written Chinese go as far back as the early Zhou Dynasty or over 3,000 years ago. While the Chinese culture itself has seen constant changes over its long life, the grammar, vocabulary, and writing system have mostly remained preserved.
The grammar and sentence structure of Chinese is very different from English. For example, in English, someone may say “I will run,” “I am running,” “I have ran,” but in Chinese someone can say, “Wo zuo”(which means “I run”) with time as an adverb such as today, tomorrow, in a little while, etc. Unlike the English translation, Chinese sentences take up less space. It is because that sentences only need to consist of several characters.
Mandarin is a bit difficule to learn but it is the most widely spoken of the Chinese language, you can find many online sites to help you to learn.
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