Empower Your Career With Knowledge of Chinese
China has one of the world's oldest and continuous civilizations, consisting of states
and cultures dating back more than six millennia. Ancient China was one of the
earliest centers of human civilization. Chinese civilization was also one of the few to
invent writing independently.
Historically, China's cultural sphere has extended across East Asia as a whole, with
Chinese religion, customs, and cultural systems being assimilated to varying degrees
by neighbors such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam.
The first recorded use of the word "China" is dated in 1555. It is derived from Cin, a
Persian name for China popularized in Europe by Marco Polo. In early usage, "china"
as a term for porcelain was spelled differently than the name of the country, the two
words being derived from separate Persian words. Both these words are derived from
the Sanskrit word for China, Cīnā.
The first evidence of human presence in the region was found at the Zhoukoudian (周
口店) cave and is one of the first known specimens of Homo erectus, now commonly
known as the Beijing Man, estimated to have lived approximately from 300,000 to
550,000 years ago.
Most languages in China belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family, spoken by 29
ethnicities. There are also several major linguistic groups within the Chinese language
itself. The most spoken varieties are Mandarin, which is spoken by over 70% of the
1.3 billion Chinese people.
In China, vernacular Chinese or baihua (白話) is the written standard based on the
Mandarin dialect first popularized in Ming dynasty novels, and was adopted with
significant modifications during the early 20th century as the national vernacular.
Most of the Chinese people speak only one common language, their mother tongue.
They are not necessarily conversant in English, not to mention the other languages
used in Europe. In order to succeed in doing business in China, learning some
Mandarin becomes almost a must for serious entrepreneurs thinking of extending their

trading horizon.
As one of the Asian modern powers in the world, China maintained a double digit
economy growth for several years prior to the recent financial downturn. Its forward
looking development in high technology still sustains one of the most prosperous
markets in the north hemisphere for foreign investors.
To businessmen born and raised in the occidental culture, there are less people who
are exposed to Chinese language and culture in your surrounding world. Thus, there
are more opportunities and less competition on the commercial market.
If you would like to familiarize yourself with the Chinese language and extend your
working circle towards the China market, we suggest that you should at least acquire
some knowledge of the spoken and written Chinese before motions are taken for you
to move your business realm towards the Asian Pacific.
TutorChinese.com is a website tailor-made to help you out in terms of cultivating your
sophisticated tastes of everything Chinese. Please do not hesitate to visit us now and
have a free trial of our cyber schooling today.
Biography
Dr. Janice Yu, is a senior e-learning analyst of TutorChinese with focus
on online language education research. She is also a news editor of the
Government Information Office in Taiwan. Previously she wrote
columns on international politics and economy in the Central Daily
News. In 1998, Yu was a Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Center in
Hawaii and she won the 1999 Distinguished Women Journalist Award from Friends of
the East-West Center Foundation. Yu completed her PhD at the University of Iowa
and served as a news editor at the China Television Company. Yu has published
around 30 books.