Understanding and exploring China through Chinese Language

Some Key Features of Chinese Language

Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the

world by the number of speakers (approximately 2 billions) including about 1 billion native speakers. Two most popular forms of Chinese language are: Mandarin and Cantonese (Mandarin is the standard form widely spoken in mainland China, whereas Cantonese is mainly spoken in Taiwan) Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is a tonal language. Chinese language doesnt have alphabet.


The written form of the language is called characters,

which is basically kind of ideogram, looks like picture. There are almost 50,000 Characters in Chinese language. But learning 3000 to 4000 characters one can accomplish daily communication, news paper reading or academic pursuit. Speaking Chinese is like singing a song, the tonal ups and downs add musical effect to the language. (Chinese is the most difficult language to learn, therefore, I often motivate my students suggesting that, studying Chinese is a good brain exercise )

Chinese Phonetics (Pinyin)

Pinyin, formally Hanyu Pinyin, is the official

phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and may be used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into computers. Chinese syllable consists of three components: an initial, a final and a tone.

Initials

Semi vowels

Finals