Why take Chinese?
- China is one of the world’s oldest and richest continuous cultures, over 5000 years old.
- China is the most populous nation in the world, with 1.28 billion people.
- One fifth of the planet speaks Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is the mother tongue of over 873 million people, making it the most widely spoken first language in the world.
- In addition to the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, Mandarin Chinese is also spoken in the important and influential Chinese communities of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, and Mongolia.
- China is the second largest economy in the world and one of largest trading partners of the United States. Most US major companies do business in China and have long-term investments there.
There are approximately 6900 languages currently spoken around the world, the majority of which have only a small number of speakers. About 4 billion of the earth's 6.5 billion people, or over 60% of the earth's population, speak one of the 30 languages as their native tongue.
Chinese tops the list of most popular world languages, with over one billion speakers. English trails in third place, with 527 million speakers.
Chinese tops the list of most popular world languages, with over one billion speakers. English trails in third place, with 527 million speakers.
- Chinese has no tenses, no cases, no genders and simple grammar. When it comes to the issue of grammatical complexity, Chinese is really one of the easiest languages there is to learn.
- Unlike most European languages, it does not feature complicated constructs like cases and genders.
- It also treats tenses in a very simplistic way.
- Furthermore, unlike other East Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese, the language is free from complicated honorific grammar.
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TED ED: Chinese History Lessons:
https://blog.ed.ted.com/2016/02/08/5-ted-ed-lessons-on-chinese-history/