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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