Chinese DiD YoU knOW That?

Curious Things and more about Chinese

• The U.S. State Department ranks Chinese in the "Exceptionally Difficult Languages" list with (Japanese, Cantonese, Korean and Arabic).

• There are 50,000 plus characters in Chinese. You need 2,000 just to read your morning newspaper.

• Chinese characters are about 8,000 years old.

• Japanese borrows from the Chinese character system but the Japanese language is however, not related to Chinese.

• One major difference between Chinese concepts of language and the West is that Chinese makes a sharp distinction between written language (wen) and spoken language (yu). This distinction extends to the distinction between written word (zi) and spoken word (hua).

• Mandarin is by far the most spoken form of Chinese (850 million).