CHINESE EXEC RI LINGUAN HOW TO

↑ Archived at the Wayback Machine (in Chinese).

↑ Chinese language at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009).

Today, many people in China can read and write with the new Simplified Characters.

CHINESE EXEC RI LINGUAN HOW TO

They also thought that if they made the characters simpler more people could learn how to read and write. The government of the People's Republic of China thought that the Traditional characters were very hard to understand. At that time most Chinese people could not read or write at all. Chinese from Mainland China uses the Simplified Characters, but may recognize Traditional Characters.īefore 1956, Chinese was written using only Traditional Characters. The Traditional Characters are now used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The pronunciation is given in the pinyin system, which may not always be as simple as it looks for those who have not studied it. Simplified Characters are on the left, and Traditional characters are on the right. Here are some samples of some words and sentences in Mandarin Chinese. However, people who have learned only the 400 most frequently used characters can read a newspaper-but they will have to guess some less-used words. About 3,000 Chinese characters are needed to read a Mainland newspaper. These characters are known in Korean as Hanja and in Japanese as Kanji.Ī Chinese person with a good education today knows 6,000-7,000 characters. The Japanese language uses them even more often. The Korean language also uses Chinese characters to represent certain words. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places where they speak Chinese, people still use the more traditional characters. In Mainland China and Singapore, people use these simpler characters. In 1956, the government of the People's Republic of China made public a set of simplified Chinese characters to make learning, reading and writing the Chinese language easier. Hakka, 客家 or 客 or 'guest family' speech (about 35 million speakers),.Min ( Hokkien, which includes Taiwanese), 閩/闽 (about 50 million speakers),.Yue ( Cantonese), 粵/粤 (about 80 million speakers),.Wu, 吳/吴, which includes Shanghainese (about 90 million speakers),.Guan ('Northern' or Mandarin), 北方話/北方话 or 官話/官话 (about 850 million speakers),.Here are the main seven main groups of languages/dialects of Chinese by size: This means that they use high and low pitches to help make differences in meaning clear.īranches in modern times are only shown for 'Guan' (Language of the officials. Nowadays the Mandarin language uses Hanyu Pinyin to represent the sounds in Roman letters.Īll the Chinese languages (or dialects) use tones. Chinese does not have an alphabet, so how to write down sounds was a big problem in the beginning. Since Chinese characters have been around for at least 3500 years, people in places far from each other say them differently, just as '1, 2, 3' can be read differently in different languages.Ĭhinese people needed to write down pronunciations in dictionaries.

They also give some indication of pronunciation, but the same character can get very different pronunciations among the different kinds of Chinese.

They are symbols that have meaning, called logograms. Chinese is almost always written in Chinese characters. Many people in autonomous regions of China speak other languages. It is also a standard for language teaching in some other countries.Ĭhinese is used by the Han people in China and other ethnic groups in China who are declared Chinese by the Chinese government. All official documents in Pinyin are written in Mandarin and Mandarin is taught all over China. The Standard Chinese language is referred to as Mandarin in English, ' Pǔtōnghuà' or 'common to everybody speech' in mainland China and ' Guóyǔ' or 'language of the whole country' in Taiwan. Official China adopts a similar policy to the one in the Soviet Union, using one official language so people can understand each other. Differences in speaking are reflected in differences in writing. Although there are many spoken Chinese languages, they use the same writing system. 'Chinese' can refer to the written or the spoken languages. As a result, many linguists refer to these varieties as separate languages. These are not mutually intelligible and many of the regional varieties are themselves a number of non-mutually-intelligible subvarieties. It forms part of a language family called the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.Ĭhinese includes many regional language varieties, the main ones being Mandarin, Wu, Yue and Min.

The Chinese language is the group of languages used by Chinese people in China and elsewhere. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.

Chinese exec ri linguan