Understand Chinese and writing it is not an easy task. In fact, they say that it is one of the most difficult languages in the world, even for people who have that innate ability to learn other languages. It takes years to master it and not to mention being able to read a newspaper in Chinese ... How do you memorize thousands and thousands of ideograms? Well, I think that in principle you have to be born and raised in China.
Well, that the Chinese writing It is of logographic origin and consists of thousands of signs or characters that have at least 3.000 years of history. According to the most common tradition, the Chinese owe their writing to Cang jie, a minister of Emperor Huang Di, who would have been inspired by the tracks left on the ground by birds to lay the foundations for the written correlation of their language.
In the museums of China there are the first traces of this writing on turtle shells or bones and this archaeological material allows us to understand the evolution of writing until it reaches our days. Of course, as China is and has always been a huge nation for some time different styles coexisted for each ideogram but with the reunification of the country under the emperor Qin Shihuang, (the one with the famous tomb with the terracotta soldiers) these differences were eliminated and a single writing system was created that over the years would take the form of the current calligraphic style.
Characters are not words but morphemes, syllables of the spoken language, and basically they are divided into 3 groups, the oldest (pictograms), The ideograms (pictograms combined to suggest ideas), and the phonograms (a radical plus another character gives a new meaning). It takes a long time to learn them all and I would say that for Westerners it is very difficult, not only to write Chinese but also to speak it because the pronunciation is very different from what we are used to (somewhat guttural and not syllabic).
Even Japanese is easier to speak. In fact, the Japanese have taken Chinese writing many centuries ago and that is why whoever reads Japanese can read Chinese. Also the Chinese writing system was adopted in South Korea and in Vietnam, but over time these countries stopped using it and only Japan remained on the list. It remains to say that to travel to China you have to write down some easy and basic phrases, and then know English.
Via: CCchino