 The Rocket Chinese Premium Interactive Audio Course is designed to get you participating in a series of conversations between Mandarin Chinese speakers, and covers everyday topics that you will encounter in a modern, Chinese-speaking environment. Each conversation is broken down into easy to manage parts, and you get written transcripts of each conversation in Mandarin Chinese (Pinyin and Characters) and the English translation, so that you can keep up with the lesson and get comfortable with written Chinese |  |
The Chinese writing system is one of the oldest known written languages
– some of the earliest examples of ancient Chinese writing date back to
over 4,000 years ago. The Chinese writing systems uses a logographic
system (a series of symbols that represent a complete word or a
phrase). The system consists of large Chinese symbols known as
characters.
The Chinese writing system is unique in many respects. First,
China is an enormous country with two main languages: Mandarin Chinese
and Cantonese Chinese. From these two languages sprouted many different
dialects. The Chinese writing system was the one unifying element that
brought all these languages into one standard written language. For
instance, while the pronunciation of the word “one” may vary from
Mandarin to Cantonese, the written character is the same. Spoken
Chinese has changed remarkably over the centuries, while Chinese
writing has changed little from the ancient Chinese.
The Chinese symbols are beautifully drawn using calligraphy.
Traditionally, the Chinese characters are written in columns. These
columns are read from top to bottom and from right to left. Because
this writing system uses a single character to represent a word or
phrase, there are literally thousands of symbols. In fact, Hanzi
(literally, Chinese for “Chinese characters”) numbers more than 50,000
symbols. This enormous amount of characters accounts, in part, for the
high illiteracy rate in China. In an effort to circumvent this problem,
the People’s Republic of China introduced a program to simplify the
language into a set of commonly used characters. The current writing
system uses approximately 6,000 of these characters. Of course, proper
names are characters that only rarely appear.
