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The Introduction to the Chinese Language

Chinese language is one of humanity's greatest and most enduring cultural achievements. Archeological research indicates that possible precursors of Chinese characters appeared as early as 8,000 years ago and that Chinese characters formed a complete system of writing by about 3,500 years ago. Among the writing systems in use at that time, only Chinese characters are still used. Further more, until recent centuries, China had one of the highest literacy rates in the world and more than half of the world's literature was written in Chinese characters.

Chinese is written in characters. How many characters are there? An educated person can probably recognize more than 6,000 characters while the most common computer encoding system in Taiwan and Hong Kong incorporates about 13,000 characters, and the standard system in China incorporates about 6,500 characters. However, since Chinese words are generally composed of two characters, only a few thousand characters can be used to understand many tens or even hundreds of thousands of words. Thus, knowledge of 2 or 3 thousand is good enough for everyday use of communication in Chinese.

Chinese characters are written in strokes such as dots, horizontal and vertical lines, etc, and the number of strokes in a given character can vary from one to over thirty. It is often said that every Chinese character is a picture, but only a couple hundred are actual Pictographs . The other 3 basic types of Chinese characters are: Ideographs , Logical Aggregates and Phonetic Complexes .

Chinese characters are often criticised for being overly complex relative to other writing systems. One reason for the added complexity is the different information content of the characters. Roman letters give relatively precise information on pronunciation, but less information on meaning. In contrast, Chinese characters give less precise (and sometimes no) pronunciation information, but do give information on meaning.

However, learning Chinese characters is not as difficult as one would think. Firstly, because the majority of Chinese characters are Phonetic Complexes , learning to pronounce them is not so difficult. Secondly, because all characters are derived from a couple hundred simple pictographs and ideographs in ways that are usually quite logical and easy to remember, learning to recognise and write them is not that hard too.

Chinese grammar is very simple. English speakers sometimes complain that languages like spanish have a complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc) but Chinese speakers complain that way about English. However, this is not a strong point in terms of computational linguistic research. For example, the lack of inflectional morphology in Chinese leads to a much more severe problem of syntactic ambiguities than European languages. For a tutorial of Chinese grammar, go to Introduction to Elementary Chinese Grammar or Basic Chinese Grammar .