Chinese characters are the oldest script in the world which is still being used today.
As early as 4000 years ago Chinese characters were used on oracle bones or tortoise shell.
About 1.3 billion Chinese (PRC, Taiwan, overseas Chinese in the USA, Singapore etc.) use these characters today, which means about ¼ of mankind.
The number of chinese characters one knows in China varies from person to person. Chinese children learn 3000 characters in the first six school years. This is sufficient for reading books and newspapers. If the number of acquired chinese characters exceeds 1500 characters one is not regarded as illiterate.
Chinese characters have a certain writing pattern. Most of the chinese characters consist of several components, one phonetic component and one symbolic component and the writing pattern acts accordingly. That means that even though the Chinese language -unlike the Roman alphabet- is not a phonetic alphabet you can sometimes recognize how a character is pronounced.
The component that represents the meaning of a character is called the radical, or basic picture that conveys meaning. On the basis of this radical Chinese characters can be arranged and looked up in the chinese dictionary. There are 214 radicals whilst the number of characters varies among Chinese dictionaries.
There have been ideas about reforming the characters in chinese writing before. During the Hundred Days Reform in the 19th century thoughts about reforming the characters in chinese writing emerged.
Chinese characters have been adopted by people whose languages differ significantly from the Chinese language. Chinese characters were or are still being used in other countries in Asia, i.e. in Korean, Japan, and Vietnam.
The handwritten Chinese calligraphy is of course much more beautiful than characters written by computer. Today only few Chinese study the art of calligraphy but calligraphy used to be of much greater importance.
The alphabet of the chinese language isn't a phonetic alphabet but consists of chinese characters which express the meaning of a word in a symbolic way that is independent from the pronunciation. Due to that cause transcriptions were made up to describe the pronunciation of the Chinese characters.
Of course the computer-keyboard does not contain thousands of chinese characters and symbols, in order to write Chinese characters on the computer. One rather uses a regular keyboard and the pinyin transcription respectively the zhuyin transcription on Taiwan for the input. After entering the pronunciation of a character into the computer, all characters and symbols with this pronunciation show up in a bar.
If your Computer is displaying the characters correctly, but not printing them in the same way, then this is because the installed printer driver is not up-to-date. The updated printer- drivers are available from the support page of the manufacturer.
The Chinese Characters present a unifying element for the culture in China. Whereas the Chinese language developed many different dialects and had gone through many changes in the course of time, the Chinese Characters have remained almost unchanged in China throughout the last 2000 years.
Here you’ll find a list which shows some examples how the names of western cities, brands, and VIPs are translated into Chinese language.
