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In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...
Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary .
The list also offers a table of correspondences between 2,546 Simplified Chinese characters and 2,574 Traditional Chinese characters, along with other selected variant forms. This table replaced all previous related standards, and provides the authoritative list of characters and glyph shapes for Simplified Chinese in China. The Table ...
官話字母; Guānhuà zìmǔ, developed by Wang Zhao (1859–1933), was the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese developed by a Chinese person. This system was modeled on Japanese katakana, which he learned during a two-year stay in Japan, and consisted of letters that were based on components of Chinese characters. After returning to ...
Sometimes, different Chinese characters are used to express the same meaning in Cantonese and Mandarin. If you use the one commonly used in Cantonese to express the same meaning when you are speaking or writing Mandarin, a native speaker may be confused or even find it difficult to understand, and vice versa.
Books containing both Chinese characters and pinyin are often used by foreign learners of Chinese. Pinyin's role in teaching pronunciation to foreigners and children is similar in some respects to furigana -based books with hiragana letters written alongside kanji (directly analogous to bopomofo) in Japanese, or fully vocalised texts in Arabic.
Chinese characters "Chinese character" written in traditional (left) and simplified (right) forms Script type Logographic Time period c. 13th century BCE – present Direction Left-to-right Top-to-bottom, columns right-to-left Languages Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese Zhuang (among others) Related scripts Parent systems (Proto-writing) Chinese characters Child systems Bopomofo Jurchen ...