Chinese Symbols

Chinese writing system is one of the oldest forms of written language in the world .People can trace the origin  of Chinese writing dating back to 4000 years ago. After the early evolution during the Shang dynasty, Chinese symbols have been evolved until today. While Chinese symbols are overly complex to the foreigners, in fact they are all derived from a couple hundred simple radicals and phonetic complements continued to be applied to form new symbols. For example, by combining the two symbols for "moon" and "sun" to represent a new symbols which is "bright." Chinese symbols are more intricate than western letters.

Linguists divide symbols into six types according to their composition .The first type is the pictogram which were originally pictures of what they represent, for example, the symbols for mountain and water were evolved from pictogram. The second type, the ideogram represents its object in abstract terms and is graphical representations of abstract ideas. The third type, the compound ideogram is a combination of two or more ideograms to represent an idea or object. The fourth type Semantic-phonetic compounds represent around 90% of all symbols. The phonograph is a combination of a meaning element and a phonetic element, and symbols involve the same phonetic component may have the same sound. The other two types, the phonetic loan and derivative character are rarely used of little significance.   Chinese grammar is much simpler than western languages. For example, there are no tenses and no plurals in this language. Obviously, it may sound a lot easier than it really is! There are more than 60,000 characters in modern Chinese dictionary, but many of which are variants or have dropped out of use. on average 4,000 symbols are used on daily basis.   Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. In 1958, Chinese adopted a system known as pinyin as romanization system, which is official alphabetic notation used in conjunction with (not as a substitute for) Chinese writing. Since the official language of China is Mandarin, this pronunciation of pinyin is based on Mandarin. The invention of pinyin has made leaning Chinese language easier than used to be.  In 1954, Chinese governments decided promoting literacy, about 2,000 of the Chinese characters have been simplified on a systematic basis, but in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao the traditional symbols are still used today. The simplified and traditional characters exist side by side in the long run.