07-12-2023, 05:58 AM
Ever wanted to learn Chinese words? Well, first things first, Chinese isn’t really a language — more a “group of languages.”To get more news about chinese alphabet a to z, you can visit shine news official website.
Specifically, Sino-Tibetan languages, of which there are many varieties. The most popular is Mandarin Chinese, from which the Chinese words we know are likely to come.
Officially, China has 10 varieties of dialects (which linguists classify as separate languages) spread across its vast country spanning the equivalent of five time zones and bordering 14 countries by land:
The next popular dialects are Min (for which Hokkien, spoken in southern Fujian and Taiwan, is a well-known variety) and Cantonese (known globally through martial arts movies and Hong Kong pop culture).
Both do not come close to the might of Mandarin — only around 6.2% and 5.6% of China’s population are native speakers of Min and Cantonese, respectively.
If you aren’t Chinese or part of the diaspora, the Chinese words and language you know of are likely Standard Mandarin.
Is it hard to learn Chinese words and language?
The short answer is: it depends on whether you grew up speaking a language that evolved from Latin (such as English, German, French) or Altaic languages (which are traced back to early millet farmers in the Liao valley in what is now northeast China).
It would take a native English speaker around 2,200 hours to achieve professional fluency in Chinese, estimates the US Foreign Service Institute — four times longer than the time required to reach the same level in Dutch, French, or Spanish.
The Chinese language is intricate, with eight variants and numerous less prevalent ones.
Compared to the a’s to z’s — 26 alphabets in total — there are thousands of characters, with each character composed of specific strokes rather than a combination of letters.
Lacking an alphabet, one cannot merely spell Chinese words based on their sounds or read words by stringing together letters.
Instead, you have to listen to tones. Similar to using tone in English to convey emphasis or emotion, every Chinese word possesses a particular tone that determines its meaning.
In other words, the same sound can have up to five different intonations, each conveying five distinct meanings.
Although it’s one of the hardest languages to master, many see it through for the many benefits they stand to gain — including some of the world’s most successful CEOs.
In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, surprised Chinese students by delivering a speech in Mandarin during an event at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
His Mandarin may have been clumsy and sounded like a seven-year-old, but that 20 minutes speech impressed many in the world’s next superpower.
It takes effort and courage to attempt to learn Chinese words — and anyone who tries to do it all deserves credit.
But beyond exposing how complex Chinese words and language are, Zuckerberg’s speech raises bigger questions: Could Chinese become the language of the future? Is it possible that Chinese might supersede English as the world’s international language?”
Specifically, Sino-Tibetan languages, of which there are many varieties. The most popular is Mandarin Chinese, from which the Chinese words we know are likely to come.
Officially, China has 10 varieties of dialects (which linguists classify as separate languages) spread across its vast country spanning the equivalent of five time zones and bordering 14 countries by land:
The next popular dialects are Min (for which Hokkien, spoken in southern Fujian and Taiwan, is a well-known variety) and Cantonese (known globally through martial arts movies and Hong Kong pop culture).
Both do not come close to the might of Mandarin — only around 6.2% and 5.6% of China’s population are native speakers of Min and Cantonese, respectively.
If you aren’t Chinese or part of the diaspora, the Chinese words and language you know of are likely Standard Mandarin.
Is it hard to learn Chinese words and language?
The short answer is: it depends on whether you grew up speaking a language that evolved from Latin (such as English, German, French) or Altaic languages (which are traced back to early millet farmers in the Liao valley in what is now northeast China).
It would take a native English speaker around 2,200 hours to achieve professional fluency in Chinese, estimates the US Foreign Service Institute — four times longer than the time required to reach the same level in Dutch, French, or Spanish.
The Chinese language is intricate, with eight variants and numerous less prevalent ones.
Compared to the a’s to z’s — 26 alphabets in total — there are thousands of characters, with each character composed of specific strokes rather than a combination of letters.
Lacking an alphabet, one cannot merely spell Chinese words based on their sounds or read words by stringing together letters.
Instead, you have to listen to tones. Similar to using tone in English to convey emphasis or emotion, every Chinese word possesses a particular tone that determines its meaning.
In other words, the same sound can have up to five different intonations, each conveying five distinct meanings.
Although it’s one of the hardest languages to master, many see it through for the many benefits they stand to gain — including some of the world’s most successful CEOs.
In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, surprised Chinese students by delivering a speech in Mandarin during an event at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
His Mandarin may have been clumsy and sounded like a seven-year-old, but that 20 minutes speech impressed many in the world’s next superpower.
It takes effort and courage to attempt to learn Chinese words — and anyone who tries to do it all deserves credit.
But beyond exposing how complex Chinese words and language are, Zuckerberg’s speech raises bigger questions: Could Chinese become the language of the future? Is it possible that Chinese might supersede English as the world’s international language?”
