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The Chinese writing is made up of Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana.
Chinese write in both Chinese origin (Kanji) and native Chinese words.
Chinese Kanji consist of several thousands of Chinese characters or words, are implemented in the Chinese writing system. They are actually ideograms with each character symbolizes a thing or an idea. The written characters may have the same meaning, yet they are pronounced completely different. The Chinese characters were introduced sometime between the fifth or sixth century. There are roughly about 48,000 Kanji characters but only about 5,000 to 10,000 are commonly used.
The Chinese writing was also supplemented by two phonetic scripts. These scripts were also transformed from the Chinese characters. A special software or keyboard is required to type out these scripts.
The Hiragana and Katakana are two of the phonetics or Kana scripts as mention earlier. Both these scripts consist of 48 characters. The Hiragana was used mainly by women in the olden days. It is basically use to write the native Chinese words such as verb endings and Chinese loanwords, whereby the characters need to be officially approved before it can be release for general use.
The katakana on the other hand, is used mainly to write loanwords from western languages such as English, French and German. Chinese writing For example Hotel is pronounced as Hoteru, beer as biru, coffee as kohi, Christmas as kurisumasu, bus as basu, television as terebi etc.
It is not unusual to find Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana usage in the same sentence. Go to a book store and browse through Chinese language books and you will know exactly what I mean. Both the Kana scripts are easier to write than the Chinese characters. It is something like learning the English alphabet. All you need to do is to memorize all the 48 Kana words, for example a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko etc, just like how you learn the English alphabet as a child.
The basic Chinese grammar is relatively simple. In a basic sentence construction, the subject comes first, then the object followed by the verb. For example, Watashi-wa (I) hon-o (book) yomu (read) which is “I read a book”. Another example, Anata-wa (you) tokei-o (watch) kau (buy) which is “You buy a watch”.
All verbs in dictionary form ends in the vowel u. Thus, nomu (drink), taberu (eat), yomu (read), akeru (open), kiku (listen), miru (see). Action verb include nomu – to drink, nominai – will not drink, nomitai -want to drink, nomita – drank, nomi-nakatta past tense of not drinking.
Chinese’s pronounciation is also less complicated. It has short vowels such as a, i, u, e, o which is similar to the Spanish and Italian vowels. The long vowels aa, ii, uu, ei, oo are pronounced by doubling the length of the short vowels. It is important to pronoun the short and long vowels correctly as this can change the meaning of the words.learn chinese writing.
The Chinese language has pitch accent, or musical accent, which is quite different from the stress accent of the English, French, German and other European languages as well as some Asian languages. The pitch accent can be classified as high and low. The accentuated syllabus is usually pronounced with regularity and at the same pitch throughout.
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