• Chinese was traditionally written in verticle columns from right to left, but now a days it is written the same as English
• The problem with the verticle lines was it was hard to write mathematical equations especially if they were more than one line in length

__Writing Structure__

• Chinese writing does not have an alphabet, instead they have a syllabary
• Mandarin or Putonghua is the official dialect of China. It is based on northern speech and consists of 1,700 syllables compared to over 8,000 in english
• Chinese writing uses characters, which have developed and changed over thousands of years, instead of letters.
• Korea and Japan have traditionally used the same characters with a few exceptions
• The characters consist of two parts - 1)The meaning (radical) 2)The sound (phonetic component)
• Characters are written with 12 basic strokes

• In 1956 and 1964 some Chinese characters were simplified (not necessarily easier to use)

SIMPLIFIED CHARACTERS

• Educated persons can recognize 6,000 characters
• Computer systems incorporate 13,000 characters
• Nouns often have two or more characters or syllables; examples shown below

• Many characters sound the same, but have different meanings (homophones)

• Chinese writing is based less on pronunciation and more on meaning
• Because of this, a person learning Chinese cannot be sure of the pronunciation of characters just by looking, they can only make an educated guess
• This is also one reason for their complexity
• The difficulty of learning Chinese allows educated and higher class people distinguish themselves from the lower class citizens
• Foreign names are translated in Chinese by sound

__Dictionaries__

You may be wondering how Chinese dictionaries are organized because of how different and complex Chinese characters are. Some Chinese dictionaries are organized alphabetically according to their translation in Roman letters. Words are then categorized by which character they use. An easier and more common way to organize Chinese dictionaries is known as the "radical." In the Radical, characters are first arranged by one key part they exhibit and then are ordered by the number of strokes they contain. Chinese has something called a Simple Stroke Count Index. This arranges characters by the number of strokes they have. Characters are listed in the group with the number of strokes they have, so if you know how many strokes one character consists of you can easily find its group; however, these are also difficult to use since one list can include 500 characters.

__How do People Type Chinese?__

Because there are thousands

and thousands of Chinese

characters, a Chinese keyboard

is not easy to use. Instead,

people have invented touchpads

that interpret Chinese characters

when written on and transfer the

writing to computers. A more recent

technologically advanced method

is using a system that interprets

the characters when spoken.

The dilemma with this is that

Chinese contains so many homophones.

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For more information on chinese writing .