Brief Introduction of Chinese Language

The Chinese language is the language of the Han nationality, is the major language of China and one of the oldest languages in the world. It belongs to Sino-Tibetan languages and ideographic characters, which is very different from the Indo-European languages such as English. According to the historical period, Chinese language is divided into ancient Chinese, middle time and modern Chinese. The ancient Chinese language is from the Shang Dynasty to the Sui & Tang dynasties; middle time is from the Song Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty; after the vernacular movement in 1919 it's called modern Chinese. The Chinese language used by the Chinese people today is modern Chinese. Character are the written form of Chinese language while Pinyin is the phonetic form of the language.

Chinese characters have history of at least more than 4000 years. Although the characters have evolved continuously, they have never been interrupted. The origin of Chinese characters is pictorial characters, and some pictographs are still used today, such as日(ri) means sun, 山(shan) means mou ntain, 水(shui) means water and so on, which are the basic of Chinese characters. Chinese characters are square characters, composed of different strokes, and have their own order and structure. For example, the word "好 (hao) means good" with two photographic characters, "女 (nu) means female" on the left and "子 (zi) child" on the right, consists of six strokes, and should be written from left to right.

Pinyin is the process of spelling, which is divided into three parts: 21 initials, 39 finals and 4 tones. In ancient China, there was no pinyin. When Chinese government came in to power on 1st October, 1949, the chairmen Mao established the Chinese Pinyin Program, which is currently used around the world.  Later on, Committee of Language Reform was formed during the period of 1955-1957 and then Chinese pinyin was officially approved on 11st February, 1958.