Responses to HanYu

[b]Responses to "The Chinese Language (Hanyu) and "Common Speech" (Putonghua)"[/b]

Scholars think Chinese wirting originated almost four thousand years ago and that the spoken language goes back to remote anitquity, making it one of the world??s oldest languages. In spite of its great age, Chinese is now one of the most widely used living languages. The language is spoken in many dialects within China, as well as in many overseas Chinese communities, especially in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas. And there are more than a billion native speakers of Chinese worldwide. It is one of the languages the United Nations uses when conducting official business.

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Hanyu, literally "lanugages of the Han", refers to the standard Chinese language, and is spoken by the Han, Hui, Manchu, and other ethnic groups that constitute 94% of the population of China. There are fifty-six recognized ethnic groups in China, using many as eight different languages.

Chinese includes variants from seven main dialect groups. The northern or Mandarin dialect covers the three fourths of China??s territory and includes two thirds of its population. Standard Chinese is also known by its official designation, Putonghua, literlally "common speech". Putonghua is based on the northern dialect, using the dialect of Beijing as the basis for its pronounciation and modern vernacular literature for its grammatical structure.

New Practical Chinese Reader, by Liu Xun (chief compiler), Zhang kai, Liu Shehui, Chen Xi, Zuo Shandan and Shi Jiawei


[color=DimGray]Notes: Coped from the website below:[/color]
[url]http://mikicv.kuap.net/[/url]

[[i] Last edited by mazy at 2007-9-11 09:40 [/i]]

Chinese must be a very difficult language for people from other countries to learn,which
contains some cultural meaning in it. We can say that Chinese is a "meaning" language. It is really an elite of our nation.

for most of Chinese people, their Chinese is influenced by native dialects, so it's also difficult for them to speak standard Chinese.

Brief Introduction of Han Yu Pin Yin

Pinyin, also known as Hanyu Pinyin is simply a method to write Chinese pronunciations by using the English alphabet (Roman characters). Pin literally means "spell" and yin "sound". The Pinyin system was initially approved by the Chinese government in 1958. And because it is such an effective tool, which is fairly simple and easy to understand, it not only makes it convenient for natives to learn the Chinese language and characters but it also helps non-Chinese speakers to become familiar with and master the standard pronunciations of Mandarin - the National Standard Chinese. Since 1979, Hanyu Pinyin had been widely accepted and adopted by many world class institutes and organizations, including the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the standard Romanization for modern Chinese (ISO-7098:1991), the Government of Singapore, the Library of Congress and the American Library Association. Pinyin has also become a useful tool for entering Chinese language text onto computers.