Chinese language
From the Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can change
The Chinese language is the language used by Chinese in China and elsewhere. It forms one of the two groups of a language family, called the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.
Chinese can refer to the written language or the spoken languages. Chinese is very special because there are many spoken languages, but they use only one way of writing the language. Therefore, it is possible to communicate by writing the same way. Many people in China think that although these different languages sound different, they are still one language. They call these different languages "dialects" to tell them apart from one another.
About one-sixth of the world, or over 1 billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their first language. There are at least seven groups of different languages that use the Chinese script. Most often, when people say the Chinese language, they refer to the Mandarin language. There are also other Chinese languages, like the Wu and Cantonese, with many speakers.
Chinese are used by the Han people in China and other races who have come to recognize themselves as Chinese. Chinese is almost always written in Chinese characters. They are symbols that have meaning, called logograms. Chinese characters exist from over 5000 years ago. Nowadays the Mandarin language uses Hanyu pinyin to represent the sounds in Roman letters.
All the Chinese languages (or dialects) uses tones. This means that they use pitch sound to set one syllable apart from another. In this way, it is very different from English and most Western languages.
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[change] Different languages or dialects of Chinese
There are at least seven main groups of languages/dialects which are known to be Chinese. They are, in order of population size:
- Guan (Mandarin) 北方話/北方话 or 官話/官话, (c. 850 million)，
- Wu 吳/吴 , which includes Shanghainese, (c. 90 million)，
- Yue (Cantonese) 粵/粤, (c. 80 million)，
- Min 閩/闽, which includes Taiwanese, (c. 50 million),
- Xiang 湘, (c. 35 million),
- Hakka 客家 or 客, (c. 35 million)，
- Gan 贛/赣, (c. 20 million)
[change] Traditional and Simplified characters
In 1956, the government of the People's Republic of China make public a set of simplified Chinese characters to make learning, reading and writing the Chinese language easier. In Mainland China and Singapore, people use this more simple characters. In Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places where they speak Chinese, people still use the more traditional characters. The Korean language also uses Chinese characters to represent certain words. These are known in Korean as Hanja.
A Chinese with good education today knows about 6,000-7,000 characters. About 3,000 Chinese characters are needed to read a Mainland newspaper.
[change] Examples
Here are some samples of some words and sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Simplified Characters are on the left, and Traditional characters are on the right. 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.
The Traditional Characters are now used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Chinese from Mainland China uses the Simplified Characters, but may recognize Traditional Characters.
Before 1956, every Chinese uses the Traditional characters. But during then, 80% of the Chinese people cannot read and write. Many people feel that Traditional Characters are just too hard to remember and write. Because of the use of Simplified Characters, currently in China, more than 90% of the people have learned to read and write Chinese.
Hello = Nǐ hǎo = 你好
How are you? = Nǐ hǎo ma? = 你好吗? = 你好嗎?
What is your name? = Nǐ jiào shénme míngzi? = 你叫什么名字 = 你叫什麽名字？
America = Měiguó = 美国 = 美國
Brazil = Baxi = 巴西
France = Fǎguó = 法国 = 法國
Britain = Yīngguó = 英国 = 英國
Germany = Déguó = 德国 = 德國
Russia = éguó = 俄国 = 俄國
Thailand = Tàiguó = 泰国 = 泰國
Poland = Bolán = 波兰 = 波蘭
Japan = Rìbĕn = 日本 = 日本
[change] Other websites
- I Love Chinese Learning Chinese Magazine
- Learn Chinese Free Chinese Learning Lessons and mp3
- Free Chinese Character Input Software Google Pinyin Input Software
- Chinese Pinyin a brief introduction to standard Chinese phonetic system
