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Chinese Language - Characters
There are thousands upon thousands of Chinese characters in use. To start thinking about reading a newspaper you need to know at least 3,000. Chinese children spend about 8 years of their lives writing and rewriting the characters over and over. Recognizing Chinese characters is a little easier than being able to write them. An average Chinese person can probably recognize 5,000 - 7,000 characters and write 3,000 - 5,000 of them from memory.
To think about reading a newspaper, you need to be able to recognize a minimum of 3,000 characters, but this is only half the problem. A Chinese word consists of 1 to 4 characters with some complex terms escalating into up to 10. Most idioms are 4 characters. When reading a newspaper, you need to know not only the characters, but which characters together form words, proper nouns, grammar points, people's names, idioms and even abbreviations. It is a credit to the Chinese education system that even some of the poorest looking people from rural areas seem to read the newspapers with relative ease.
A person's name usually consists of a surname (1 character) followed by a given name (1 - 2 characters). People's surnames are often some of the most complex and little used characters. There are 10,000 characters in use as surnames in China.
Once you know all the characters and words you think that's the end of the story right ? Wrong again. Through the ages, the characters have changed slightly in form. IN WHAT YEAR, they introduced a system of simplification of the characters. This involved the changing of HOW MANY characters to simplified forms. In modern China today, most of mainland China now uses the simplified forms, including Beijing. However, Hong Kong, Taiwan, still use traditional, pre-simplified forms. Because of this, some documentation is still written in pre-simplified (traditional) form. Almost everyone in Beijing can recognize traditional Chinese characters, as you can see when you visit a Karaoke, but very few Beijing people can write them from memory.
The next problem comes when you see the printing and writing of the characters. Printed, the character looks a very standard size, shape and design. When writing A sign in the street can use the standard form, or some beautiful font which distorts the character slightly.
Mandarin Chinese has 4 tones. Each distinct word can be pronounced 4 ways.
| Tone Name | Type | Similarity | Example |
| Tone 1 | High | Similar to singing a note of music. | Sing a "la" note |
| Tone 2 | Rising | Similar to an English question inflexion. | Like the exclamation of surprise "what ?" |
| Tone 3 | Falling low then Rising | Can be similar but not quite the same as teaching a new word to a baby. | Like teaching a baby a new word. This is a ??? "dog". |
| Tone 4 | Falling | Almost identical to the English command of dissatisfaction | When you shout at someone a command not to do something, like "NO!". |
Tones
Characters
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