The Chinese Language

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Chinese Language Sites

The Chinese People

The PRC (People's Republic of China) has more people than any other single country (on less that one tenth of the world’s arable land in one time zone: UTC+ 8). Additionally, there are over a million "ethnic Chinese" within the United States, Canada, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

"Chinese to become #1 web language by 2007." is a conjecture perpertrated as "fact" by ads promoting the Accenture international consultantcy firm. The quote came from Chris Wood's August 21, 2000 Maclean's Magazine article The Future: Will It Work? Amid Smart Robots and Wireless Wonders, Some See a Dark Side.
This prediction is not far off. baidu.com, the Chinese search engine, is among the Top 20 web sites in the whole world, as reported by Alexa.

Chinese Dialects

• Cantonese (spoken by those in and from Hong Kong and surrounding Guangdong province in SouthEast China),
• Taiwanese (also called Ming or Hokkien),
• Mandarin (the official Guan-Yu language originating from Beijing),

Articles from David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)

The 'correct' or 'standard' way to pronounce Mandarin is what is spoken by educated speakers in Beijing in the north of China.

Chinese Locales

Locale Code	Language	Country	Locale Name	Note
zh	Chinese		Chinese
zh_Hans	Chinese (Simplified Han)		Chinese (Simplified Han)
zh_CN zh_Hans_CN		CN	Chinese in the PRC
zh_SG zh_Hans_SG		SG	Chinese in Singapore
zh_Hant	Chinese (Traditional Han)		Chinese (Traditional Han)
zh_HK zh_Hant_HK		HK	Chinese in Hong Kong SAR China
zh_MO zh_Hant_MO		MO	Chinese in Macao SAR China
zh_TW zh_Hant_TW		TW	Chinese in Taiwan

Chinese Names

For example, the traditional Chinese glyph for the English word "horse" is 馬, which is my last name. My first/given name (Wilson) is transliterated from the words "courage" - 成 - and "faith/trust" - 信 (信).

Unlike Western cultures, Chinese names are written leading with the family name, then the given name. The Chinese culture has so much reverence for family (filial) connection that many still bow three times every day to the picture of an ancestor.

Writing Chinese

The graphemes of written Chinese do not map onto individual phonemic units of the spoken language as much as in English. This is perhaps why the French have the expression "C'est du chinois", "It's Chinese", i.e., "It's incomprehensible", just as Shakespeare used the phrase "it's Greek to me".

Instead, each logogram (sinogram) corresponds to one (typically monosyllabic) morpheme.

Chinese Food

E. N. Anderson's 1990 The Food of China (Paperback) is the authoritative textbook.

Francine Halvorsen's The Food and Cooking of China

Speaking Chinese (Pronunciation)

The Chinese language contains about 400 syllables (excluding tones). By contrast, English has 12,000.

Chinese has many homophones (words with the same sound expressing different meanings). For example, mouse over these 4 Tones:

1-da	"to hang over something"
2-dá	"to answer"
3-da	"to hit"
4-dà	"big"
da

The Pinyin 拼音 system of pronuncing standard Mandarin was defined in the 1967 Dictionary of New China (as in PRC). It became ISO-7098:1991 since 1979.

The switch to Pinyin from previous romanization schemes is what caused the English name for place names to change. For example, the Enligh name for the capital city of China switched from "Peking" under the Wade-Giles to "Beijing" under the Pinyin scheme.

Although Hanyu Pinyin uses all 26 characters of the Roman alphabet (plus the seldom used ü umlat characters used as tone marks) Roman letters in Pinyin are not pronounced the way they are in English phonics. Pinyin is not a completely logical or consistent system.

John's Pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese: Misconceptions
Pinyin Alphabet Song for Mandarin Chinese

Reading and Writing Chinese: A Guide to the Chinese Writing System by William McNaughton and Li Ying introduces 2,000 traditional and simplified Chinese characters with pinyin, stroke order, English meaning, and sample compound words.

Integrated Chinese (Level 1) (Cheng & Tsui Company, 1997) by Tao-chung Yao and Yuehua Liu

Easy Chinese.com
Pinyin pronounciation cheat sheet
Chinese Lessons from the Netherlands
Wikipedia on Pinyin

Pinyin was designed in 1956 to replace the Yale romanization and the Zhuyin Fuhao (注音) Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (MPS I), commonly referred to as Bopomofo because that's the sound of the first letters in the alphabet. It was created in 1913 and still used in Taiwan.

Fluenz Chinese Learning System is superior to Rosetta Stone in that it provides a glossary and videos rather than static photos. For $338, you also get to look at pretty young American Sonia Gil talk playfully while she flips her Jennifer Aniston hairdo ;)

Websites providing Mandarin phrases:
BBC
Haiwang Yuan at the Western Kentucky University
chinaadviser.com
languageguide.org/mandarin/
slanguage.com
chinese.travel-way.net

Chinese Calligraphy

There are different tie or master calligraphy works representing different styles. Chinese handwriting are usually in the more fluid Xing Shu style named after Shan Yin (Shao Xing) Lan Ting, the location where 40 poets gathered on March 3rd, 353 during the Jin dynasty. The preface to the collection of poems created there, called Lan Ting Xu, was written by the "calligrapher sage" Wang Xi Zhi (321-379). It's considered the zenith in Chinese calligraphic art. The Tang dynasty emporer Tang Tai Zong was so impressed with it that he had the original buried with him. But even though he sent copies to his ministers before his burial, no good copies are available today.

Understanding Chinese Characters by Their Ancestral Forms by Gam Go and Ping-Gam Go describes the origins of 288 common Chinese characters and shows actual current usage with 72 color photographs taken in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Most printed materials are in the more formal Kai Shu (meaning "standard" or "model") script formalized during the Han dynasty. It is less efficient to write but easier to read.

In Chinese, any tool for writing is called a bis. Specifically, the bi is the tool for doing Chinese calligraphy. meaning it's a tool used for writing and it's made from hair.

Melanie Votaw's 2003 The Art of Chinese Calligraphy provides brushes, paper, ink, and inkstone with an instruction book.

Strokes

The bushou system (literally "section-heading" but often mistranslated as "radical") — defined in Xu Shen's etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi from 2000 years ago. — which connects one part of each character with 214 characters:

Chinese Calligraphy (From Pictograph to Ideogram : The History of 214 Essential Chinese/Japanese Characters) (Abbeville Press, hardcover) by Edoardo Fazzioli

罐 (can,jar) has 22 strokes.

The basic strokes are:

Heng — The basic horizontal stoke, starting from left and end at right.
Shu — The basic vertical stoke, from top to down.
Pie — The basic stoke, from right high position to left low position.
Na — The basic stoke, from left high position to right low position.

Bound forms never appear alone, but only appear as components of compound characters.

Some radicals, such as the glyph for "silk", are always on the left of a character.

Chinese Characters

The PRC has defined 2,557 characters children must learn during their 6 years of elementary school, during which they gradually acquire knowledge of the detailed structure of the components and subcomponents of characters.

Test your knowledege with the Chinese Character Test Applet by Clavis Sinica (Chinese Reading and Reference Software).

Educators at Yale compiled their list of 1000 characters beginning students should first learn.

Reading and Writing Chinese: A Guide to the Chinese Writing System (Charles E. Tuttle Co.; Revised edition September, 1999 Paperback) by William McNaughton & Li Ying makes the letters easy to learn by first introducing 1,062 simple characters before presenting the rest. Pronunciation guides and meanings are described for every word.

Additionally, there is a list of 421 technical characters.

Dictionaries

The first Chinese dictionary, the San Chung, was compiled by Li Si on order by the emporor Qin.

Lookup Unicode on Erik E. Peterson's English-Chinese Dictionary You can also quickly locate characters based on the geneaology (etymology of each character at Rick Harbaugh's dictionary tree at zhongwen.com (from the two Chinese characters meaning "the Chinese Language") shows how every part of every character can be traced back to less than 200 root characters wen ("writing") of the new zipu system. Its character tree structure allows any Chinese character to be found given any component of its character or any character which shares the same component.

Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary: A Study Guide to Mandarin Chinese's 500 Most Frequently Used Words (Paperback) by Yong Ho.

ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2000)

Translations

Typing Chinese

Office XP/2002+

Office 2000 or older versions

Older DBCS/Big5 Font Technologies

In 1995 the Hong Kong government defined a "Government Chinese Character Set" so that Big5 can be adopted by augmenting it for archaic and some colloquial Chinese characters used in the Cantonese (JukJi 俗字) used by Hong Kong residents. In 1999 the HKSCS-4818 (Hong Kong Special Supplementary Characters Set) were defined for Unicode.

Chinese Unicode Fonts

GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It is formally called "Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2000: Information Technology — Chinese ideograms coded character set for information interchange -- Extension for the basic set". The "GB" abbreviates Guojia Biaozhun (English for Chinese 国家标准, which means "national standard"). The Standardization Administration of China (SAC) (the Chinese National Committee of the ISO and IEC) has mandated GB18030 (UTF-16) support for all computer operating systems sold in the PRC.

Standard simplified Chinese has 6,000+ characters (Unicode code points) with four font faces:

Song
Hei
FangSong
Kai

Microsoft's GB18030Tools Support Package (downloaded as GBEXTSUP.msi and installed in Windows 2000 & XP Program Files) provides the SimSun18030.ttc font to enable the display of GB 18030 characters, Its GBunicnv.exe end-user application converts between GB18030 plain text and HTML files to Unicode (according to the Authoritative mapping table). It includes all the characters in Unicode 2.1 plus new characters in Ext. A. The full Unicode 5.0 set:

Unified CJK Ideographs	4E00-4EFF
CJK Ideographs Ext. A	3400-34FF (4DBF)
CJK Ideographs Ext. B	200000 - 2000FF

As FontChecker notes, different font manufacturers use different numbers to designate a particular glyph.

The manufacturer of the Hiragina Kaku font has the character horse at location 99AC (the Unicode standard), but they are calling that character: "g3333".
The manufacturer of the Osaka font calls their horse character "a946e".
The manufacturer of the Apple LiGothic font calls their horse character "ab0a8".

GuoBiao

GB18030 maintains compatibility with the 1980 GB2312 Simplified Chinese standard Unicode font. So websites targeted for people on the mainland (such as baidu.com) have the following at the top of every page:

<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html;charset=gb2312">

Adobe offers several font packs with Adobe Readear 7.0 that is not installed in the "Resource\CIDFont" directory under the default "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0" or where Adobe Reader 7.0 was installed.

Wazu.jp showcases Asian characters displayed using different font faces you can download.

Download and copy the "Ming Uni" (GB18030) font (with 35,788 glyphs), then extract the .ttf file into your C:\Windows\Fonts directory. It renders better than the 18,965 glyph "Adobe Ming Std" font, so don't be fooled by the "Std" in the name.

If you use firefox, go to Tools -> Options, Advanced, and Choose a Language from the dropdown languages to Add.

google.cn can be used for a quick check of Chinese font display.

The more fonts and the larger the fonts loaded, the more memory and time it will take take to render all pages.