Learning how to read and write Chinese is hard. Yet with a tutor and memory-aid in your pocket, you no longer need a strong work ethic and prodigious memory
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskWithout doubt, though, it is hard. Opinions vary on how many characters a user must know, but around 1,000 are needed for minimal function; 6,000-8,000 is a common estimate for an educated person. Characters are usually assembled from smaller pieces, one of which might give a clue to the meaning and the other to its pronunciation. But that is not always so, and in any case, which piece goes where is not fixed.
Bringing Chinese into the modern, international and digital world is the subject of “Kingdom of Characters”, a fascinating book by Jing Tsu of Yale University. First, the modernisers had to replace classical Chinese. This involved choosing one of the many mutually unintelligible spoken varieties at a heated conference in 1913. Wang Zhao, one of the key figures there, chased another delegate from the room for having called him a “son of a bitch”—or so Wang thought.
International use of Chinese has not grown at anything like the pace of China’s economy and global clout. The difficulty of learning the written language is undoubtedly one reason why. The difficulties of using it on a computer are another. It is hard to imagine two foreigners writing to each other in Chinese as many do in English.
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