Interesting facts about the Chinese language

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Chinese Language is one of the oldest languages around and is now spoken by 1.3 billion people in the world. If you’re interested in learning Chinese, here are some facts to keep you going!

1. One of the oldest languages 

First Chinese characters were seen in 1250 BC, about 3000 years ago. They were found engraved on an animal bone.

2. It’s the only modern pictographic language

Objects are described in the form of a drawing or an image.

3. The language doesn’t have alphabets 

It has different characters rather than sequential alphabets. Chinese can be transcribed into characters with the use of Pinyin.

4. The language contains over 50,000 characters

That is a lot but the good news is that you only need to learn about 20,000 characters for regular use and 2,500 to read a newspaper.

5. The language has no articles or plurals

The language doesn’t have “a, an, the” rulings along with no plurals.

6. Consists of two sets of Chinese characters 

The sets being Simplified and Traditional. Many modern speakers use simplified characters. Traditional characters were used in ancient times.

7. It is an official UN language 

Was included as the national language in 1946. The official UN languages are Chinese, English, Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish.

8. It is a tonal language

The pitch of how you say a word can completely change the meaning of the word!

9. Has derived words from English language 

Words like “kafei" means coffee and “shafa" means sofa.

10. There is no gender in Chinese 

There are no masculine, feminine words in the language.