Chinese Language – Brief Info

Chinese, which is formed of characters, is among the world's oldest written languages. Generally
speaking, each character stands for a meaningful syllable. The total number of Chinese characters is
estimated at more that 50,000 of which only 5,000-8,000 are in common use. Of these merely 3,000
are used for everyday purposes.
The Chinese characters in use today developed from the pictographs cut on oracle bones dating from
over 3,000 years ago and the pictographs found on ancient bronze vessels dating a little later. In the
course of their history of development, Chinese characters evolved from pictographs into characters
formed of strokes, with their structures very much simpler. Most of the present-day Chinese characters
are known as pictophonetic characters, each formed of two elements, with one indicating the meaning
and the other the sound.
Chinese characters have made great contributions to the long history of the Chinese nation and Chinese
culture, and Chinese calligraphy is a highly developed art. But Chinese characters has serious
drawbacks, It is very difficult to learn, to read and to write and still more difficult to memorize.
Reforms should be carried to make the characters easier.

Scheme for the Chinese phonetic alphabet

“The scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet”, which was adopted at the First Penary Session of the
First National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China on February 21, 1958, is a set of
symbols used to transliterate Chinese characters and combine the speech sounds of the common speech
into syllables. The scheme makes use of the Latin alphabet, modified to meet the needs of the Chinses
language. The scheme, which will form the foundation for the creation of a Chinese alphabetic systms
or writing, is being used through-out the country to facilitate the learning of Chinese characters, help
unify pronunciation and popularize the common speech. The scheme has for years been used among
foreign learner of Chinese as well and and has been found much useful and helpful.

The Complex and Simplified Forms of Chinese Characters

The ultimate aim of the reform being carried in the Chinese writing system is to gradually replace the
ideograms with a phonetic writing system. Before this can be done, the characters should first of all be
simplified and the number of strokes of the characters reduced so as to relieve much of the burden of
both users and learners of Chinese. The simplification of Chinese characters is two fold: reduction of
the number of the characters (mainly through the elimination of the complex variants) and reduction of
the number of the strokes of which a complex character is composed (by the popularization of the
simplified characters). Since the 1950s and especially with the publication of the1964 list, the PRC
(People’s Republic of China) has officially adopted this simplified form of Chinese Characters.

This simplification conforms entirely to the general tendency of development of the Chinese characters
towards greater simplicity. The simplified forms, as compared with their complex equivalents, are
much easier to learn, to memorize, to read and to write. A very few examples will help to show the
advantages of the simplified over the complex forms: men 们 (們), ma 马 (馬), huan 欢 (歡), jin 进
(進).

Practiacl chinese reader

the commercial press ltd
1981