The development of Chinese characters

Facts Capital and Major Cities: Capital: Beijing, population 11 million. Major Cities: Shanghai, population 15 million. Shenzhen, population 12 million. Guangzhou, population 7 million. Hong Kong, population 7 million.

Government: The People's Republic of China is a socialist republic ruled by a single party, the Communist Party of China. The official language of the PRC is Mandarin, a tonal language in the Sino-Tibetan family. Within China Population: China has the largest population of any country on Earth, with more than 1.35 billion people.

Over the past 25 years, China has had the fastest-growing major economy in the world since the 1970s the PRC has remade its economy into a capitalist powerhouse.

Chinese characters can be dated back to about 5,000 years that carved by the ancients of the Shang Dynasty. Cangjie created the earliest written characters.

The earliest forms of Chinese written characters is pictographs but only a couple hundred are actual pictographs. It is the earliest method by which Chinese characters were designed and from which the other methods were subsequently.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions Oracle bone inscriptions, the earliest Chinese writing scripts, are the ancient Chinese characters carved on toroise shells and animal scapulas.

Chinese Dialect Groups There are seven dialect groups in China. Mandarin- 70% of population in China. Language spoken by government officials. Putonghua, hanzi, zhong wen, hua wen, hua ye, beijing hua, guo yu.

Sound system Four tones Pinyin in PRC National phonetic alphabet in ROC

Grammar Use of word order and auxiliary words to indicate grammatical relations. 你好吗？ 你是谁？

Number of Characters Chinese dictionary has 49,888 characters Simplied character has about 6502 characters. A person needs to only master about 3,000- 4,000 characters or reading a newspaper. 1,500 to 2,000 characters for daily life usage.

What are simplified characters? In 1949, after the revolution, the new government considered eliminating character in favor of an alphabet, but decided instead to simplify many of the characters. The emphasis in all these cases was on reducing the number of strokes. It was politicized. The simplify characters are now used in China and Singapore. Taiwan, Hong Kong are most overseas Chinese communities continue to use the traditional forms.

Direction for reading Chinese characters Traditionally Chinese characters were written vertically in columns with columns written from right to left. This is still the most common method. In China most writing is now the same as in English. Japan and Korea has adapted Chinese characters.

What are radicals? Chinese dictionaries arrange characters according to radicals. A term which is usually translated as radical. The number of radical used in dictionaries from mainland China has recently been further reduced to 178.