The development of Chinese characters

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The development of Chinese characters
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Facts

• Capital and Major Cities
• Capital
• Beijing, population 11 million.
• Major Cities
• Shanghai, population 15 million.
• Shenzhen, population 12 million.
• Guangzhou, population 7 million.
• Hong Kong, population 7 million.

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• Government
• The People's Republic of China is a socialist
  republic ruled by a single party, the Communist
  Party of China.
• The official language of the PRC is Mandarin, a
  tonal language in the Sino-Tibetan family. Within
  China
• Population
• China has the largest population of any country
  on Earth, with more than 1.35 billion people.

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• Over the past 25 years, China has had the
  fastest-growing major economy in the world
• since the 1970s the PRC has remade its economy
  into a capitalist powerhouse.

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• Chinese characters can be dated back to about
  5,000 years that carved by the ancients of the
  Shang Dynasty.
• Cangjie created the earliest written characters.

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• The earliest forms of Chinese written characters
  is pictographs but only a couple hundred are
  actual pictographs.
• It is the earliest method by which Chinese
  characters were designed and from which the other
  methods were subsequently.

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Oracle Bone Inscriptions

• Oracle bone inscriptions, the earliest Chinese
  writing scripts, are the ancient Chinese
  characters carved on toroise shells and animal
  scapulas.

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Chinese Dialect Groups

• There are seven dialect groups in China.
• Mandarin- 70 of population in China. Language
  spoken by government officials.
• Putonghua, hanzi, zhong wen, hua wen, hua ye,
  beijing hua, guo yu.

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Sound system

• Four tones
• Pinyin in PRC
• National phonetic alphabet in ROC

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Grammar

• Use of word order and auxiliary words to indicate
  grammatical relations.
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Number of Characters

• Chinese dictionary has 49,888 characters
• Simplied character has about 6502 characters.
• A person needs to only master about 3,000- 4,000
  characters or reading a newspaper.
• 1,500 to 2,000 characters for daily life usage.

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What are simplified characters?

• In 1949, after the revolution, the new government
  considered eliminating character in favor of an
  alphabet, but decided instead to simplify many of
  the characters.
• The emphasis in all these cases was on reducing
  the number of strokes. It was politicized.
• The simplify characters are now used in China and
  Singapore.
• Taiwan, Hong Kong are most overseas Chinese
  communities continue to use the traditional
  forms.

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Direction for reading Chinese characters

• Traditionally Chinese characters were written
  vertically in columns with columns written from
  right to left. This is still the most common
  method.
• In China most writing is now the same as in
  English.
• Japan and Korea has adapted Chinese characters.

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What are radicals?

• Chinese dictionaries arrange characters according
  to radicals. A term which is usually translated
  as radical.
• The number of radical used in dictionaries from
  mainland China has recently been further reduced
  to 178.