Footprints Recruiting

Language in China

Calligraphy The national language is Putonghua (the common speech) or Mandarin, which is one of the five working languages at the United Nations. Most of the 55 minority nationalities have their own languages. Cantonese is one of the local dialects of southern China. As a written language, Chinese has been used for 6,000 years.

The Han people have their own spoken and written language. Chinese belongs to the Han-Tibetan language family. It is the most commonly used language in China, and one of the most commonly used languages in the world.

Written Chinese emerged in its embryonic form of carved symbols approximately 6,000 years ago. The Chinese characters used today evolved from those used in bone and tortoise shell inscriptions more than 3,000 years ago and the bronze inscriptions produced soon after.

Drawn figures were gradually reduced to patterned stroke, pictographs were reduced to symbols, and the complicated graphs became simpler. Early pictographs and ideographs were joined by pictophonetic characters.

In fact, there are six categories of Chinese characters: pictographs, self-explanatory characters, associative compounds, pictophonetic characters, phonetic loan characters, and mutually explanatory characters.

Chinese words are monosyllabic. A large proportion of Chinese characters are composed of an ideogramatic element combined with a phonetic element.

Many non-Chinese sometimes get the feeling that there are an unlimited number of Chinese characters. There are about 56,000 characters, of which only about 3,000 are in common use. In addition to their functional value as symbols for records and communication, Chinese characters have an aesthetic value as calligraphy.

All of China's 55 minority people have their own languages, except the Hui and Manchu, who use Chinese; 23 of these have a written form. Nowadays, classes in schools in predominantly national minority areas are taught in the local language, using local language textbooks.

Download Chinese Language Wallet Cards:

useful expressions in Chinese

Useful sites for studying Chinese:

Conversational Mandarin Chinese Online: http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/ccol/content.htm
Learn Chinese: http://www.minmm.com/
Audio Chinese of Survival Chinese: http://www.wku.edu/~yuanh/AudioChinese/

Learn Chinese

China Information - Language in China

Learning Chinese may seem like an impossibility with the glotal sounds and the brush stroke characters but is it? Other people have done it? Learning Chinese is like learning anything, you need to invest some time into it. Whether your goal is to learn Chinese to become fluent or whether it's to simply be able to order food in a restaurant or give directions to a cabbie, the Rosetta Stone Chinese language learning kit is a great way to get started in your effort to learn Chinese.

Footprints strongly recommends that teachers in China put in a little extra effort to learn Chinese; you will be absolutely shocked at the difference it makes in your quality of life and in how the locals receive and appreciate you.

Good luck!

Empathetic Teacher

China Information - Language in China

Life has definitely been a roller coaster over the last few months.

We started language classes about two months ago and our days have descended into a sort of constant trudging here and there, being full time students and full time teachers. There are obvious benefits to this, for instance, the other day my Chinese teacher was telling us (in Chinese of course) that this particular grammar concept was really quite simple and she didn't know why we didn't understand something so simple, and I just started laughing because I could think of all the times I had wanted to say the same thing to the students or teachers where I work in regards to some of the finer nuances of the English language.

Being a simultaneous teacher/student presents one with numerous opportunities to sort of view the benefits and disadvantages of various teaching and learning styles, but it really does not leave one much leisure time to think through them, and that has been our greatest struggle. At this point, we never have a real day off, and sleeping in has become a thing of the past. My typical day is getting up at seven, getting ready, going to school, classing for three hours, eating lunch, going home, taking a nap or trying to relax for two hours, going to work for several hours, going home, doing a little homework, going to bed. My weekends are still twelve hours of work.