Chinese writing system

The first fully developed Chinese writing as we know it today the inscriptions on tortoise shells and ox shoulder blades, commonly known as script of Oracle bone that appeared in the mid-Millennium BC, during the late Shang dynasty.

Unlike a phonographic writing as that of English where each letter of the alphabet encoded a telephone, write China is a logographic with each grapheme (or character) system simultaneously encoding sounds and what it means that the level of the syllable. As a logographic system, Chinese script has the great advantage that is not necessary for a person who knows how to decode the writing system to learn how to pronounce the characters to be able to read messages written on them.

Writing Chinese, however, it is not only a system of Visual cues or ideograms, which represent various concepts or ideas that are completely divorced from the pronunciation. A literary speaker in any Chinese dialect may immediately pronounce a Chinese character in its own dialect. The character, as a logographic with a simple graphic structure, makes do not represent any phone determined within a Word, but a syllable associated with a Chinese morpheme written as a representation of the morpheme-syllable system is systematically phoneticized, i.e., the characters are readable.

In modern Chinese, characters, or graphemes are known as hanzi, literally "Have characters" is named after the dynasty have (206 BCE-220 CE). It was during the dynasty have said written Chinese was largely standardized at a time when writing brushes, ink, ink and paper, stone wenfang sibao "four treasures in a Studio", became standard tools of Chinese writing.

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About spoken Chinese

Chinese is the language of more than one billion speakers. There are several families of dialect of Chinese, each in turn composed of many dialects. Although different dialect families are often mutually unintelligible, systematic correspondences (e.g. in the lexicon and syntax) exist between them, making it easy to ensure that the speakers of a dialect collect another relatively quickly. The largest dialect family is the family of the North, which consists of more than 70% of Chinese speakers. Standard or Chinese Mandarin is a member of the family of the North and is based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect. Interestingly, most standard Chinese speakers have another dialect as their first language and only less than one percent of them speak without some degree of accent.

There are 22 consonants in Chinese Mandarin. Compared to English, the distribution of the consonants in Chinese Mandarin is closely dependent on the position of the syllable and the syllable structure is much simpler. There are two kinds of syllables - complete and weak ones - in Chinese Mandarin. The first is inherent, underlying tone and is long, while the latter does not have any intrinsic tone and is short. A complete syllable can change to a weak, losing his tone intrinsic and subjected to syllable rime reduction and shortening (similar to the reduction of the syllable in English).

In contrast to English, which has more than 10,000 syllables (mono), Chinese Mandarin has only about 400 syllables excluding tones (and 1300) including tones. Relatively simple phonological constraints can be sufficiently described the way in which many available syllables are excluded as being valid in Chinese Mandarin.

The special characteristics in spoken Chinese signal properties consist of tonality and fundamental frequency variations indicating identity in language paralinguistic information lexical. Analysis of the discourse of fundamental frequency or tone extraction techniques, therefore, are most important for the Chinese than for non-tonal languages, like English. Recent research has provided production and accounts perceptual tonal variations in Chinese, where the articulatory restriction in the processing of perception has been quantified.

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Learn the language that is spoken by the largest number of people in the world

Those who have a range of Chinese (Mandarin) will have one cutting edge over others as China is one of the economies of the fastest growing in the world, and for the foreseeable future, Mandarin will exert an influence that nobody can ignore.

Language ESL specialist provides opportunities unprecedented for those who have a desire to learn (Mandarin) Chinese in China. The beautiful monumental city of Beijing has two partner of ESL language schools: Language School Mandarin House and school Sprachcaffe language.

Language School House of Mandarin in Beijing is located in the China Central place, where there is no shortage of ultramodern hostels, shops, banks international offices and all that. The school offers optimal conditions for learning (Mandarin) Chinese in China. The school has nice, professional and peaceful atmosphere. The building is equipped with all modern facilities equipped classrooms and cafe, where students can relax and chat with other students after their classes.

Housed in the Cultural Palace in the interior of the Tartar city of the Manchus, language Sprachcaffe school also offers courses Junior Chinese (Mandarin) in China. It has spacious and bright classrooms, a cafeteria, and almost all modern facilities that allow students to learn Mandarin intensively in a relaxed atmosphere.

International language school house in Qingdao offers courses in Mandarin high quality focused primarily on communication. This school is divided into two centres of course: East and West. Both centres have classrooms equipped with air conditioning, Internet access, coffee shops, spacious living room, where students can relax.

Mandarin language school house in Shanghai, which is located in the heart of the city centre, close to the pedestrian section of Nanjing, is one of the best schools to learn (Mandarin) Chinese in China. It is surrounded by restaurants, cafes and shops that meet diverse needs of students. The school has a qualified, trained and dedicated teachers who is always willing to help students. The school has 22 equipped classrooms, a multimedia room which offers free Internet and WiFi access.

School of languages to International House in Xi'an also offers courses Junior Chinese (Mandarin) in China. This school is located in the Centre of Xi'an - the Capital of China Shaanxi Province. International House in Xi'an is located in a modern, two-story building and features well equipped 16 classrooms, a library, a room for students, a kitchen, a computer room with free Internet access.

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Chinese, Zhongwen, Hanyu

China, as a name of language in English, refers to the subgroup Sinitic languages Sino-Tibetan in Asia. But it can be translated to several Chinese names for the language that covers many different ideas depending on the context.

Firstly, China can be translated as zhongwen generally referring to the language. Zhongwen is also the correct term for the academic discipline in the study of Chinese language and literature, such as zhongwenxi for the Department of Chinese at a university environment.

Secondly, the hanyu word "Han language" used in the context contrasting languages spoken by the nationality of have that 92% of 1.300 million Chinese citizens of the people's Republic with all languages have not spoken in China and the rest of the world. Therefore, foreign students who are now learning Chinese say to go learn hanyu.

Thirdly, when hanyu is a general term for the languages, many of which are mutually unintelligible between speakers of different varieties of language have, by default refers to the standard dialect of the country known as putonghua literally means "common language" in the people's Republic. Putonghua is a constructed language-based standard, a variety of Chinese North, spoken in the capital city, Beijing. On the other hand, China corresponds to a number of Chinese equivalent on the basis of the given speech community.

Traditionally, the Chinese have are divided into seven main groups dialect, Mandarin (or beifanghua of northern China), Wu, Xiang, Gan, Kejia (Hakka), Yue (Cantonese), Min. Although sharing a large number of cognates or words of common origin, Chinese dialects vary considerably more in their sound systems. All Chinese dialects have tones with contours of different tone for each syllable.

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The southern and Northern Chinese (Mandarin) dialects

The plethora of the linguistic diversity of the Chinese languages in the South and a Mandarin unified in the North might be related to the geographical features of northern China and the South. "Dialects of Chinese Mandarin," are distributed between the plain of yellow and the plateau of Loess that has a flat terrain that promotes tourism and, consequently, easy contact between the people there. Ramsey observes that "this remarkable difference Linguistics between a unified North and a fragmented South is a measure of how much life and society have been affected by geography". As a result of this geography, creates an area of northern Chinese more uniform with mutually intelligible dialects. In contrast, mutually unintelligible dialects are spoken in the areas south of the Yangtze River because there are people stood by mountains and rivers.

The dialects of the North, with almost 900 million speakers, are commonly subdivided into four main varieties: characteristic of the Northwest, North, River, and Southwest. The Northwest variety refers to the dialects spoken in the region of the plateau of loess with the ancient capital city Xi'an as its Center. The variety right North is spoken in areas as Hebei province, province of Shangdong and provinces in the northeast (Manchuria). This variety is the basis of the standard dialect in modern China. The language was formed through immigration large scale persons residing in this area over the past several hundred years. Therefore, Northeast dialects have a strong resemblance to other dialects of the North as in the majority of migrants settle there originally moved from the area of the northern dialect. The River variety spoken in the region to the North of the Yangtze River around the city of Nanjing was once considered the most prestigious dialect of the nation during and after the Ming dynasty. The Southwest variety developed out of several waves of emigrants to settle in the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou China central after the dynasty Ming.

During the 18th century the Qing emperors sent troops to settle in these remote areas permanently with their families and encouraged immigration on a large scale of Hubei and Hunan provinces to reclaim land in Southwest China. As a result, the Southwest variety in many ways resembles the language spoken in Hubei province. North China usually has fewer tones of Chinese dialects in the South. However, the most notable feature distinguishing Chinese North of the southern Chinese dialects mutually unintelligible is perhaps the lack of stop endings that prevail in many dialects of the South such as Wu, Yue and Min.

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Languages of Mandarin Chinese, transcription systems and character sets

Many dialects are spoken in China. Mandarin is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken in most parts of North, Central and Western China. However, Mandarin, as it is known in the world, refer to standard Mandarin (or modern standard Chinese) based on the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin is the official language known as Putonghua in China. Standard Mandarin is also one of the five official languages of the United Nations and is used in many international organizations. Phonologic descriptions show the structural model of a Mandarin syllable is an optional initial consonant followed by the vowel, and then optionally followed by an alveolar nasal ending or velar. Another component of the Mandarin syllable is the tone which primarily specifies the tone of the syllable pattern. Technically, a syllable occurs in terms of its initial, final and tone. Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language because tones, just like consonants and vowels, are used to differentiate words each other.

Chinese linguists have proposed various systems of transcription of Mandarin. But the most popular are Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu Pinyin was accepted as the official transcription system of the Chinese language in 1958 by the Chinese Government. The transcription system used in the entry of Chinese characters in the computer systems.

Currently, there are two sets of Chinese characters used by the users of the Chinese language, namely, traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters. Traditional Chinese characters have been used since the century v. This character set is still currently used in some Chinese communities overseas. Simplified Chinese characters originate in the simplification of formal, during the 1950s and 1960s. Now, this simplified Chinese character set is the system of writing in China and is accepted by the United Nations. Computer systems, use different codes for these two sets. The code of guobiao, are silenced (GB) is a national standard character encoding in China. Refers to the set of GB 2312-80 issued in 1981, the GB 18030-2000 set issued in the year 2000. There are 6.763 Chinese characters in GB 80 3212 established code.

Chinese Mandarin is known as monosyllabic because most of the words are one syllable in length. This is true for classical Chinese, but it is no longer true for modern Chinese. A large number of polysyllabic words used today in the Chinese newspaper. One syllable when it pronounced with different tones corresponds to different characters. A Word is written in polysyllabic form with two or more characters. Already Chinese texts without spacing between words, an additional effort is required to segment a phrase in parts of the word. Due to these characteristics, the design of the corpus of Chinese language needs additional considerations. Most of the developed Chinese language processing systems recently is standard Mandarin. Few of them meet other dialects such as Cantonese, Min nan, Hakka, Wu, etc..

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The strokes of Chinese writing

The Chinese character for "cloud" was written as in the Oracle bone script and bronze script, those who have a line of curves in the bottom something like a piece of floating cloud. However, after Chinese writing was standardized after the dynasty Han, various Chinese graphemes can be analyzed in terms of lines, i.e., lines, points and hooks that draw not a piece of paper with a writing instrument, forming Chinese characters encode words. For example, in the standard script, the previous angular and wavy lines were replaced by more and more regular lines that are more compatible with stroke techniques. In so doing different types of strokes can be identified easily. A Chinese character should write blow by blow. Chinese children are taught to write different strokes in each Chinese character strictly following the rules of stroke order.

There are many practical reasons for students to learn these rules of stroke order. For example, writing is considered an art form in Chinese culture. These rules can help students to develop some skills in the placement of several strokes proportionally to produce aesthetically acceptable Chinese characters. In addition, one could not use many Chinese dictionaries effectively without knowing the order of the strokes, as most index dictionary rules systems draw for order of strokes as a useful to help users form are the entries of a certain Chinese character. Even though the romanized spelling system was introduced, most Chinese dictionaries still offer an index based on the number of strokes because there are many people who are not familiar with the system of romanized adopted in a given dictionary pronunciation or a certain Chinese character pronunciations. For example, in the most commonly used the contemporary Chinese dictionary in China, is a system of index two stages is divided into two sections, "radical initial" and "guide of the radical", both of which largely depend on the number of strokes. This dictionary, which contains over 56,000 words, recognize some initial radical 200. The user needs to count the number of strokes in the radical initial of a Chinese character, or the first Chinese character if the word has more than one Chinese character, find the section that has all the Chinese characters with the same radical initial. Then the user must have the number of strokes in the rest of the Chinese characters to find the page number where are listed all the entries from the Chinese characters.

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Chinese language and culture

The Chinese language, which is a communication system used by the Chinese people on a daily basis to meet several goals in life, inevitably leads many features that reflect some of the social beliefs widespread in their culture. Culture can be defined more or less as socially learned patterns of behavior and interpretative practices, what language plays an important role. In fact, the ways in which many words in Chinese idioms, popular proverbs, metaphors and neologisms are widely used among Chinese correspond to cultural beliefs and experiences that have shaped China as a country in the last three millennia.

In addition, the Chinese people, which has been in contact with many foreign cultures and languages throughout history, has also embraced and integrated into their own culture, many ideas and foreign concepts. The structures of neologisms, including many Chinese words of European origin and the system of writing Chinese morpheme-syllable are examined together to show the importance of the meaning of coining neologisms in Chinese. For example, the use of modern Chinese culture representing the culture was adopted from Japanese as it was first widely used in Japan as a lexicon neologized that represents the culture of the European word in the 19th century. In the 19th century the Japanese taken these two Chinese graphemes to create a new Word to translate the European culture word in Japanese. Later, this Japanese word neologized was reintroduced in Chinese or returned to China, to translate the word Europe itself.

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