Learn Chinese

The Chinese Language and Pronunciation

This article gives one the idea of a rich culture the Chinese people have.

An authority to the study of Chinese language says that there are two elements to the Chinese language: the written language, based on individual symbols called characters, each of which represents an idea or thing; and the spoken language, which includes a number of different dialects.

As has been said and written by a reliable source, the written language originally had no alphabet, but it was easily understood by literate people with different dialects.  The Pinyin has been developed in China as early as the 1950s and is now commonly being used.  This is a system using the Latin alphabet.  It represents the spoken sounds of Putonghua (based on Beijing-area Mandarin), which is an oral representation of Chinese characters.

Because some of the numerous dialects of spoken Chinese are totally different from each other, all of them use tones to distinguish different words. Mandarin, which is spoken in the Beijing region and in northern China generally, has four common tones. Cantonese, spoken in southeastern China, has nine tones and is quite different from Mandarin. Cantonese is probably most common among Chinese-American immigrants. Today Putonghua, is the official language of government and education, and everyone is expected to learn to speak it.

It has also been said that written Chinese characters have no “pronunciation” and can be spoken in a variety of ways depending on the dialect used and that there have been a number of ways of rendering Chinese words into English. For many years the most used was the Wade-Giles system, which did not in fact represent Chinese sounds very well. In the United States this is most often the system encountered in older textbooks and even transliterated shop names.

This basic knowledge could be a guide to anyone who wishes to learn the language which is said to be the most spoken language in the world.  The historical background has to be known prior to learning the language so that there would be deeper appreciation on the part of the learner and that interest would likewise be achieved.

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The Chinese Language

People are a lot luckier when they know a language or two (excluding their mother tongue). We may believe in this notion but a few of us do not really care. Rich people or those who could afford to spend a fortune painstakingly face the difficulties associated with learning a language not their own just so they could be educated with the language of other culture and race. Whatever their motives are, they are probably good enough.

Presently, the “flavour of the month” goes to learning the Chinese language over any other languages because of the surging or overwhelming rise of China’s stature in the economic world.

Learning Chinese is not an easy task. The following facts, which were taken from the internet source in verbatim, can justify how difficult it is to learn the Chinese language. However, this is just an opinion. When a person is directly involved in the study of the language, he or she may find it a lot easier.

• In spoken Chinese, words are made up of one, two or more syllables. Each of the syllables is written with a separate character. Each character has its own meaning, though many are used only in combination with other characters.

• Every character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how complex it is. There are no spaces between characters and the characters which make up multi-syllable words are not grouped together, so when reading Chinese, you not only have to work out what the characters mean and how to pronounce them, but also which characters belong together.

• The Chinese writing system is an open-ended one, meaning that there is no upper limit to the number of characters. The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are archaic, obscure or rare variant forms. Knowledge of about 3,000 characters enables you to read about 99% of the characters used in Chinese newspapers and magazines. To read Chinese literature, technical writings or Classical Chinese though, you need to be familiar with at least 6,000 characters.

• There are approximately 1,700 possible syllables in Mandarin, which compares with over 8,000 in English. As a result, there are many homophones - syllables which sound the same but mean different things. These are distinguished in written Chinese by using different characters for each one.

Many can afford to study the Chinese language but only a few of them could see the essence of learning and applying what they have learned.

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Why We Need to Learn Chinese Now

In an internet resource, it has been said that there were over 500 million English speakers in China and India and that this overwhelming number exceeded the number of “mother-tongue” speakers from the United States and Britain.  This report was made by Reuters in February 2006.  It is then projected that within the next decade, the number of foreign students studying English as a second language will be around 2 billion. 

The above can be viewed as positive or negative from different points of view.  From common sense, one could just tell that a person has greater advantage when he or she knows a language or two other than his or her own language.  He is at an advantage level over someone who only knew how to speak the mother-tongue.  When a Chinese knows how to speak English and goes to the United States or any other country who speaks and understands English, there will be less problem that he would likely encounter.  However, when an English speaker goes to China or any other Chinese speaking country, he or she should not expect that people in that country would understand him/her or treat him/her with esteem or respect especially when he/she does not know Chinese.  People feel appreciated and respected when a foreigner knows how to speak their language.  In gratitude, these people would treat you nicely and with so much respect that you deserve. 

The moral lesson of this article is that we should try to learn other languages so that we will be able to earn respect from others and that we will also be able to learn other cultures thereby making us more culture-sensitive and appreciative of others.

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