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Overview |
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China is a multi-national country. Every nationality has its own language. Han nationality, which accounts for 90% of the population, uses Chinese as its language.
Chinese is one of the most ancient languages in the world. It has been used for more than 3,000 years since words appeared. Different from other phonetic languages, Chinese has no direct connection between its words and pronunciation. Therefore, although people in different areas use the same Chinese characters, their pronunciations differ in areas. As a result, there are a great deal of dialects in China.
Since the 1950's, Chinese government has begun to promote the campaign of speaking Standard Chinese for the purpose of communication and regulating the language. Standard Chinese takes Beijing accent as its standard pronunciation and northern dialect as its basic dialect. It refers to classic modern colloquial works for grammatical rules. Now most Chinese people are using standard Chinese language in their work and everyday life. |
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| The Characteristics of Chinese Language： |
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Chinese has its unique characteristics.
In terms of pronunciation, there are four tones in Chinese, among which vowels are dominant in syllables. Therefore, speaking Chinese is like singing songs. |
| e.g.I like studying Chinese. |
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(Click to play) |
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| Chinese is rich in vocabularies, most of which are dual-syllable words. There are a lot in common in terms of word formation and sentence structure. |
| e.g.Han Yu（Chinese language） (Han means Chinese; Yu means language) |
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| In terms of grammar, Chinese uses a lot of measure words. Word order and function words are important in forming sentences, but it lacks abundant changes in forms and shapes, which is characteristic of spelling languages. |
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| In terms of characters, Chinese language is a kind of ideogram. That is to say, seeing the figures of Chinese characters, you may guess the meaning of the words. Chinese words are full of connotations, just like pictures. |
e.g.person  |
mouth |
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2002-2009：