"Chinese Phonetic Alphabet” (known as Pinyin) which was adopted in 1958, is a set of symbols used to transliterate Chinese characters and combine the speech sounds of the common speech into syllables. This Pinyin makes use of the Latin alphabet, modified to meet the needs of the Chinese language.
Pinyin, which will form the foundation for the creation of a Chinese alphabetic systems or writing, is being used through-out the country to facilitate the learning of Chinese characters, help unify pronunciation and popularize the common speech. Pinyin has for years been used among foreign learner of Chinese as well and and has been found much useful and helpful.
Currently this Pinyin is used as one of the methods for typing Chinese Character in computers. So far, this typing method is the most popular method especially among the young Chinese generation as well as the foreigners who learn Chinese. It is because this typing method uses normal English keyboard - really convenient.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Friday, February 23, 2007
Learning Chinese Character (Hanzi / Kanji)
Learning Chinese for non Chinese speaking is admitly considered as a bit more difficult compared to learning other languages. The biggest burden is for memorizing thousands of Chinese characters. Surprisingly, actually it's not really a burden for a young child to study Chinese Language (including its characters) eventhough it's not their first language.
Actually if we study more deeply about Chinese, we can see lots of interesting background about it. Here are some of them:
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Chinese Language is one of the world’s oldest written languages, also the oldest ‘surviving’ writing systems. Unlike the other languages, Chinese language is formed of characters. Chinese character is known as Hanzi (in Mandarin Language) or Kanji (in Japanese language). Generally speaking, each character stands for a meaningful syllable. In order to understand reading and writing in Chinese for everyday use, one should understand about 3000 Chinese characters. Actually total number of Hanzi is more than 50,000 characters of which only 5,000 – 8,000 are still in common use now.
Chinese characters in use today developed from the pictographs cut on Oracle Bones dating from over 3,200 years ago and the pictographs found on ancient bronze vessels dating a little later. Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known Oracle Bone pictographs can be identified with later Chinese characters and therefore easily read. These 1,400 pictographs include most of the commonly used ones. 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 picto-phonetic 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 have 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.
(from many sources)
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Actually if we study more deeply about Chinese, we can see lots of interesting background about it. Here are some of them:
------
Chinese Language is one of the world’s oldest written languages, also the oldest ‘surviving’ writing systems. Unlike the other languages, Chinese language is formed of characters. Chinese character is known as Hanzi (in Mandarin Language) or Kanji (in Japanese language). Generally speaking, each character stands for a meaningful syllable. In order to understand reading and writing in Chinese for everyday use, one should understand about 3000 Chinese characters. Actually total number of Hanzi is more than 50,000 characters of which only 5,000 – 8,000 are still in common use now.
Chinese characters in use today developed from the pictographs cut on Oracle Bones dating from over 3,200 years ago and the pictographs found on ancient bronze vessels dating a little later. Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known Oracle Bone pictographs can be identified with later Chinese characters and therefore easily read. These 1,400 pictographs include most of the commonly used ones. 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 picto-phonetic 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 have 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.
(from many sources)
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