How does one know Chinese?
This weekend, we spent time with our very good Chinese friends Hua and Zhihao and, as always, we had interesting discussions comparing and contrasting British and Chinese culture and lifestyle. Once again, the issue of the Chinese language came up, initially in the context of the Chinatown restaurant sign for the toilets.
I was interested to have explained that the Chinese pictogram for ‘man’ is a combination of two symbols, meaning a worker (lower part of symbol) and a field (upper part). You can view the pictogram here.
In checking this out on the Internet, I asked myself: how can one say that one knows Chinese?
First, there is no such thing as the Chinese language in the oral sense. As the Wikipedia page puts it:
“Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable to the Romance language family: many variants of spoken Chinese are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most populous by far is Mandarin (c. 800 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), and Cantonese (c. 80 million). The identification of the varieties of Chinese as “languages” or “dialects” is a controversial issue. If Chinese is classified as a single language rather than a group of languages, it is the most widely spoken language in the world. However to do so would equate to classifying the languages of Southern Europe as a single language.”
Second, if there are many oral versions of what is commonly – but wrongly – described as Chinese, there is only one written version that has not changed that much in a millennium. Whereas English speakers only have to learn 26 letters of the alphabet and many children can identify these at an early age, the written Chinese language consists of pictograms that are considerable in number. There is a theoretical total of almost 50,000 written Chinese characters. However, fortunately, ‘only’ about 5,000 of these are frequently used. Among these 5,000, if one learns about 200 key words that are most often repeated in daily use, then one can say on knows Chinese. Simple really!
January 15th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
yes, i have read many articles talking about the chinese languages. one of them says, it is the unified single written format that makes china a united country for the last 3000 years.
for the local dilacts, it is just too hard , even for the native speakers, to understand each other.
but, in the last 20 years, the government has put some effort in Standard language, which made many yound people could speak Standard Madarine. I, though, still hope this will NOT terminate some local accents which probably represents the local culture the most.
thank,
alex