Interesting facts about the language

The most striking thing when you arrive in China is, of course, the script used to write this language: You see the wonderfully ornate characters everywhere – sometimes in an old-fashioned calligraphy version, sometimes in a modern computer font. If some of the characters weren't also written in English, you'd feel like you'd landed in a completely different world.

Chinese can look back on a long tradition of writing: For 3,000 years, the Chinese language has been written continuously in characters. Each character represents one (or more) syllable(s). In total, Chinese culture knows about 90,000 characters—but don't panic: Many of these 90,000 characters are no longer in use; they often only appear in older literary texts, and even many Chinese people have to look these characters up in a dictionary.

If you take a closer look at a character, you will notice that each character is made up of several (individual) strokes - the radicals. In Chinese dictionaries, the characters are grouped and arranged according to these radicals. When writing each character, you must pay attention to the specific order in which the individual strokes are put together to form a character. When learning Chinese, please do not make the mistake of trying to copy the characters. You will not achieve much success in "writing" the characters by "drawing" them. Therefore, please always try to actually write the characters. Chinese characters can be divided into six categories. On the one hand, there are picture characters (pictograms) that capture real-life phenomena in an image. Learners can remember these characters particularly well. Doesn't the character 人 remind you of a running stick figure? And that's right: it translates as "person." The character 山 represents a mountain, and 田 means "field" in English. The second category is also helpful for learners, as ideograms make abstract ideas easy to visualize. The character 一, for example, stands for 1. If you put a second line over it, 二, it becomes 2. And what do you think the Chinese 3 looks like? That's right: 三. In addition to these two categories, there are also compound characters that take on a new meaning. For example, if someone is so strong (力) that they can pull a plow (the character for strength is reminiscent of this implement) across a field (田), then they must be a real man (男). The character for man is therefore a combination of the two characters for strength and field. In addition to the three categories mentioned, Chinese also has characters that distinguish synonyms and characters that make similar-sounding syllables separable.

Most Chinese characters, however, are so-called phonograms. In a phonogram, one part of the character indicates its pronunciation, while the second part contains information about its meaning. Until the 1950s, many different languages were spoken in China, and there was no common language that everyone in this vast country could understand. As part of a reform of the Chinese script, the spread of Mandarin Chinese (also known as Mandarin; the Chinese themselves call the language Pǔtōnhuá) as a unified standard throughout China was encouraged and demanded.

Today, 880 million people in China and Taiwan speak Mandarin Chinese, making it the most widely spoken language in the world. Mandarin is, on the one hand, a tonal language. On the other hand, the Sino-Tibetan languages are characterized by their isolating language structure. To understand this, you need to know that there is no inflection in Chinese. You can't say "I go," "you go," "he goes," etc. Inflection of nouns such as "the house," "of the house," etc. is unknown in Chinese. However, in order to understand statements and construct meaningful ones, you have to adhere to a fixed sentence structure. Sentences in Chinese always follow the pattern subject-verb-object. We'll illustrate this with an example: If you say "我爱你" - which in German means "I love you" - you can also break up and change the sentence structure in German by saying "I love you." However, if you now rearrange your Chinese sentence in this form and say "你爱我," the meaning of the sentence changes fundamentally, because now you have said "You love me." To make learning easier for you, every Chinese language course from Sprachenlernen24 also includes the transliteration of the characters into Latin letters. This transliteration is also used in China as an official form of Romanization and is called "Pinyin."