Wikijunior:Languages/Mandarin Chinese
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[edit] What writing system(s) does this language use?
All Chinese dialects including Mandarin are written with hànzì, a picture-like writing system. However, many English-speaking students learn to pronounce Chinese (or "zhōngwén") using a Romanization system called Pinyin. See below for some examples.
So how do characters work? Does Chinese have an alphabet? No, Chinese does not have an alphabet. They do use radicals, which will be explained below. Characters however, are written with strokes, or different lines. There are three types of characters: pictographic, ideographic, and picto-phonetic. Pictographic characters are just what they sound like, they try to represent a thing or action as a picture. For example, the character for sun (rì -which sounds like "rurr") was originally a circle with a dot in the center, an attempt to draw a sun. The modern character is a vertical rectangle divided in half by a horizontal line. It is a 4 stroke character.
alphabet — all the letters of a language.
character — a letter, number, or punctuation mark.
Ideographic characters are used for things that are a bit more difficult to describe than with just a drawing. Love, hate, anger, happiness, goodness — all of these are very hard to capture in a simple picture. Ideographic characters try to address this problem by combining different pictures to convey meaning. Going back to the goodness example, the Chinese character for goodness, “hǎo”, is depicted using two separate characters, a woman and a child, combined into one character.
Picto-phonetic characters combine a meaning radical which hints at the meaning of a character with a sound radical which hints at the pronunciation of the character. "Grass" for example is written as the character for "early" (which sounds like "grass" in Chinese) with a radical meaning "grass" above it. A reader can look at the grass radical and guess or recall the meaning while looking at the sound radical and guess or recall how it is pronounced.
Radicals are the closest thing that Chinese has to what English speakers would call an alphabet. Radicals, like an alphabet, allow speakers to reuse portions of the language. And since Chinese has some 10,000 plus characters in usage, radicals become very useful to allow for fast memorization of a character. Characters will get some of their meaning and/or sound from a radical (like picto-phonetic characters). You can imagine radicals as a foundation, or base, of the Chinese written language.
Radicals are kind of like the different symbols used in public signs. A "no smoking sign" is a cigarette that has been crossed out, a "no dogs allowed" sign has a dog that has been crossed out. We can reuse the meaning of the crossed out symbol to create new signs and guess at the meaning of new signs we have never seen before. In the same way Chinese characters that have to do with children may have have the radical for "child" in them, and characters that have to do with actions or things done with the hand may have the radical for "hand" while the rest of the character hints at the pronunciation.
Are there different ways of writing Chinese? Yes, there are two main ways of writing Chinese, simplified and traditional. Simplified was invented by the PRC (People’s Republic of China) to increase literacy, or reading levels in China. Traditional is as you can guess, the “traditional” way of writing Chinese. It is used in places such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. It is also used in traditional texts, paintings, genealogical charts, food packaging, and more! If you want to live in China, it is handy to know both simplified and traditional, as you are likely to run across both forms.
[edit] How many people speak this language?
Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world. In fact, over 800 million people speak this dialect of Chinese. That's more than one out of every seven people! However, like most languages, there are many other dialects, such as Min Nan, Shanghainese, and Cantonese.
dialect — one form of a language; sometimes different regions of a country develop slightly different forms of a language, called dialects.
[edit] Where is this language spoken?
Chinese is mostly spoken is the People's Republic of China (including Hong Kong and Macau) and Taiwan. It is also one of the four official languages of Singapore (together with English, Malay, and Tamil), and is also spoken among the people of Chinese ancestry in Malaysia.
[edit] What is the history of this language?
China has a history of five thousand years of continuous civilization, so it is probable that the Chinese language is at least as old as this. Archeologists have found Chinese pictographic writing on pottery, bones and turtle shells from as long ago as the Shang dynasty, over 3000 years ago. By the time of the Qin dynasty, 2000 years ago, Chinese writing had been standardized and it has changed very little since then.
Because Chinese is not an alphabetic language, it is hard to know exactly what the language sounded like in the distant past.
There are now five main spoken dialects of Chinese including Mandarin, Wu dialect, Yue dialect, and Cantonese. These are as different from each other as English and German and could be thought of as separate languages - but speakers of all the dialects use the same writing system.
[edit] Who are some famous authors or poets in this language?
Poets and Ci authors (in order of fame):
李白Li, Bai
杜甫Du, Fu
蘇軾Su, Shi
李清照Li, Qingzhao
屈原Qu, Yuan
曹操Cao, Cao
Authors (in chronological order of birth):
孙子Sunzi (author of "The Art of War")
孔子Confucius (most influential philosopher in Korean, Chinese and Japanese societies)
陸機Lu, Ji (author of "On Literature," a piece of literature criticism)
劉勰Liu, Xie (author of "Carving of a Dragon by a Literary Mind," a piece on literature aesthetics)
陈独秀Chen, Duxiu (one of the main promoters of modern written Chinese language)
鲁迅Lu, Xun (one of the most influential writers of the 20th century)
胡适Hu, Shi (one of the main promoters of modern written Chinese language)
[edit] What are some basic words in this language that I can learn?
Basic Greetings:
- 你好！- Ni hao! - "Hello!"
- 再見!/ 再见!- Zaijian! - "Good bye"
- 明天見！/ 明天见!- Mingtian jian! - "See you tomorrow!"
- 我的名字是霖達。/ 我的名字是霖达。- Wo de ming zi shi Linda. - "My name is Linda."
- 我叫霖達。/ 我叫霖达。- Wo jiao Linda. - "I am Linda."
- 很高興認識你。/ 很高兴认识你。- Hen gaoxing renshi ni - Nice to meet you.
Courtesies:
- 請您/请您 - Qing nin - "Please... / Could you..."
- 謝謝/谢谢 - Xie xie - "Thank you."
- 不客氣/不客气 - Bu keqi - "You're welcome."
- 對不起/对不起 - Dui bu qi - "Sorry."
- 真對不起/真对不起 - Zhen dui bu qi - "I'm very sorry."
- 沒關係/没关系 - Mei guanxi - "No problem, don't worry about it."
Listen to some Chinese words! Interested in hearing Chinese? Check out this site, [1], which has great aural coverage of the language along with examples of both Pinyin and simplified/traditional characters.
- (Traditional Characters followed by Simplified Characters)
[edit] What is a simple song/poem/story that I can learn in this language?
[edit] Big Head
| Characters (Simplified) | Characters (Traditional) | Pronunciation | English |
|---|---|---|---|
|
大头大头 |
大頭大頭 |
Dà tóu dà tóu |
Big head, big head |
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Wikijunior: Languages | edit | |
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Introduction • Glossary • Authors and Contributing • Print Version |
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