Can You Provide An Overview Of The Chinese Language?

Chinese is reputedly one of the oldest languages in the world, and perhaps the most difficult. The difficulty lies mainly in the fact that the Chinese language does not have an alphabet. Instead, it has thousands of different characters. While a standard dictionary for high school students may contain only about 10,000 characters, a comprehensive dictionary contains over 40,000. However, it is generally estimated that if a person knows from 3,000 to 4,000 characters, he should do reasonably well in reading publications of general interest.

Characters are the basic units or symbols of the written language and are all monosyllabic. While each has its own meaning, two or more characters may be combined to form new words. For example, the character "ren"  by itself means "a human"; when combined with the character "min"  the resulting word "ren min" means people of a country. "Ren" can also be combined with two other characters "jiann" and "jeng"  to form the word "jiann jeng ren" , meaning a witness. In the language spoken today, usually two or three separate characters are required to denote a single concept or term.

Most Chinese characters are made up of (1) the radical, which often provides a hint to the meaning, and (2) the phonetic, which gives a key to pronunciation. For example, the "heart" radical  is found in characters that express thoughts, emotions, personal characteristics and the like. There are 214 radicals listed in most dictionaries, while the number of phonetics varies according to the preference of the individual scholar. Though such phonetics originally were used to indicate the pronunciation of the word, owing to changes in pronunciation over the years, these are no longer reliable. Thus you may find that two characters with the same phonetic part have no similarity at all in their pronunciation nowadays.